Dual-Booting XP?

[Jonathan Hutchins]

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.