Is there an issue with using Lilo (or Grub) to dual boot with XP? I've never had any trouble with NT, although I didn't bother to skip the NTLoader, so I had two boot managers running at startup if I chose NT. I prefer Lilo to Grub, it's easy for me to understand, and I love the ability to change defaults permanently or temporarily from the command line (lilo -R windows;shutdown -r now).
On Sun, 23 Jan 2005 15:33:47 -0600, Jonathan Hutchins <hutchins@tarcanfel.org> wrote:
Is there an issue with using Lilo (or Grub) to dual boot with XP? I've never had any trouble with NT, although I didn't bother to skip the NTLoader, so I had two boot managers running at startup if I chose NT.
If you read my earlier post today, you'll see the details on how to use the XP boot loader. The reason why this is necessary is that XP has nonstandard MBR code, and can look to undocumented data structures outside the MBR/primary partition table sector for information about filesystems.
On Sunday 23 January 2005 03:56 pm, Monty J. Harder wrote:
If you read my earlier post today, you'll see the details on how to use the XP boot loader.
That's why I asked.
The reason why this is necessary is that XP has nonstandard MBR code, and can look to undocumented data structures outside the MBR/primary partition table sector for information about filesystems.
Well, so can Linux for that matter. XP's "MBR code" is "nonstandard" compared to what? Doesn't Microsoft pretty much set the standard for the MBR? From what I can find, XP uses the same bootloader as NT does. I suspect this may be more of the "Linux can't write to NTFS" FUD* - I found one article that even cited this myth as the reason you couldn't use LILO or Grub on an NTFS partition. The MBR is not part of the partition, and is not affected by the filesystems on the drive. I haven't been able to find any specific documentation on people having trouble using Grub or LILO as the primary bootloader in the MBR with XP. I did find some threads where people had _heard_from_other_people_ about problems with XP not being the primary loader. The accounts I found most credible were of problems with anti-virus software complaining about the boot record - something that's usually just a matter of acknowledging that the MBR has been changed or switching off MBR checking. I'm curious if anybody can find any _first_hand_ accounts of standard, vanilla XP (Home or Pro) not booting properly with Grub or Lilo as the primary bootloader; or if they have accounts of special situations where the XP bootloader was specificly required. (Were these reported by people who were competent in working with the bootloader, as opposed to newbies who'd never seen it before?) (I have heard of general boot problems with _VERY_OLD_ versions of Lilo, but have never been able to reproduce them with current versions.) *It's always good to CYA, but while I've found documentation of why _some_ NTFS installations might not work with Linux, I havent' been able to reproduce them. Most standard NTFS partitions work just fine with the native Linux drivers, and if there were an issue the "captive drivers" system would overcome it.
On Sun, 2005-01-23 at 15:33 -0600, Jonathan Hutchins wrote:
Is there an issue with using Lilo (or Grub) to dual boot with XP? I've never had any trouble with NT, although I didn't bother to skip the NTLoader, so I had two boot managers running at startup if I chose NT.
My daughter dual boots SuSE 9.2 and WinXP Home with grub just fine. Wifes box used to dual boot SuSE 9.1 and WinXP Home, but she has no need for windurs anymore so the partition was removed. In both these cases WinXP was installed first, with SuSE handling the dual boot setup. I setup dual boot Gentoo and WinXP Pro for my brother, again grub, no problems. In this case Gentoo was installed first, with WinXP Pro coming in after the install, either way being Gentoo, this was a manual config of grub. -Bill
On Sun, 23 Jan 2005 15:33:47 -0600 Jonathan Hutchins <hutchins@tarcanfel.org> wrote:
I prefer Lilo to Grub, it's easy for me to understand, and I love the ability to change defaults permanently or temporarily from the command line (lilo -R windows;shutdown -r now).
That's an odd statement in my opinion. Since once of the nicest things about GRUB is that you can change your settings from the freaking boot loader! No more searching for a rescue disk when you typo a lilo.conf entry, just change it at boot time and voila! --------------------------------- Frank Wiles <frank@wiles.org> http://www.wiles.org ---------------------------------
On Sun, Jan 23, 2005 at 03:33:47PM -0600, Jonathan Hutchins wrote:
I prefer Lilo to Grub, it's easy for me to understand, and I love the ability to change defaults permanently or temporarily from the command line (lilo -R windows;shutdown -r now).
GRUB takes a little bit to learn, but it makes more sense to me know that LILO used to. GRUB lets you do a lot more than LILO. Rebooting to a different "default" kernel/partition is a little trickier in GRUB, but you can do something like this: ### go-windows.sh ## #!/bin/sh /sbin/grub --device-map=/boot/grub/device.map --batch <<END_GRUB_INPUT savedefault --default=3 --once quit END_GRUB_INPUT /usr/bin/reboot #################### This will change your default kernel/partition once and then reboot into it. Jeremy
participants (5)
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Bill Cavalieri -
Frank Wiles -
Jeremy Turner -
Jonathan Hutchins -
Monty J. Harder