w2k/u7.10 dual-boot

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Wed, Feb 06, 2008 at 04:10:03PM -0500, chris-n/jUll39koHNgV/OU4+dkA at public.gmane.org wrote:
> This is uncharted territory so I don't know if you'll want to hazard a 
> guess. What do you think the chances are that this problem would be 
> rectified by doing the W2K/u7.10 dual-boot installation again, this time 
> with W2K on ntfs? 
> 
> I just don't want to waste a couple of hours if there's no hope. 
> 
> I seem to recall there was some scenario in which the bootloader should be 
> installed on the "first sector of the boot partition" instead of the MBR. 
> Maybe that's for a dual-boot of W98 and NT or somesuch (and nothing to do 
> with linux). Does that ring a bell? 

I used to do that back when I used to reinstall windows every 3 months
(generally a good idea with win9x), and windows would overwrite the MBR
every time, so having the boot loader on the first primary linux
partition meant I could get the system booting normally again simply by
changing the active partition in fdisk from dos to be the linux
partition instead of the C: partition.  The MBR stayed as the generic
'boot the partition with the bootable flag'.

Since I no longer reinstall windows (or install in the first place) on
my machines, I just install GRUB in the mbr and don't have any
partitions flagged bootable.  Windows does seem to insist on having a
bootable partition so marking C: bootable might be a good idea.

Do NOT resize the windows partition while installing linux.  I wouldn't
trust it to get that right.

--
Len Sorensen
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