dual booting

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: Lennart Sorensen <lsorense-1wCw9BSqJbv44Nm34jS7GywD8/FfD2ys at public.gmane.org>

| On Thu, Dec 31, 2009 at 09:43:32PM -0800, William Park wrote:

...

| > Windows and Linux on separate harddisk is the easiest way.  You can then
| > choose which harddisk from BIOS boot menu.
| 
| Well does it work with GPT or only DOS style partition tables?

GPT is a bit of a mystery to me.  Not so much the theory.  Just which
tools and environments work with GPT?  Should we all switch to GPT and
be done with the old style?

| Swapping HD IDs from the BIOS can cause a serious mess.  I don't do that.

Yeah.  I had one machine set up that way.  Mostly because I found
Vista so unwilling to survive a Linux installation.

When I asked the BIOS to boot from the second (Linux) drive, drive
naming in Linux changed.  So I had to patch up the installation.  This
was over a year ago, so I don't remember what I had to change, but I
think it was /boot/grub/{menu.txt,grub.conf}.  Using UUID in
/etc/fstab should fix any problems there.

I don't want to install a second drive to dual boot.  I keep Windows
if it was bundled with the machine, but I don't want to waste a whole
drive on it.  All I seem to do with MS Windows is apply updates (to
Windows and to firmware).

When I've installed Linux on a system with pre-installed Vista, the
main problem is with resizing the Vista partition.  Vista itself can
resize, but it never seems willing to give up much space.  Ubuntu's
partition editor (gparted, I think) can resize Vista partitions, but
it damages them.  What works for me is to do the resize in Ubuntu and
immediately reboot Vista; it will complain and then fix up the
partition.  Then it is safe to install Linux.

| I used to install the bootloader in the linux partition, but some
| filesystems don't seem to support that, and everything seems to default
| to the MBR these days so I gave up on it.  Also with DOS's fdisk it was
| easy to change the active partition back to the linux one, while with
| modern windows that is no longer a simple thing to do.

What filesystems don't leave the first sector as a boot record?

I try to install bootloaders on the boot record of the partition.
Unfortunately, some Linux installers (Fedora 11 and 12, and maybe some
Ubuntus) claim to be willing to do this but have curdled the MBR in
the process.  I've not dug into this because testing is so laborious.

I think (but do not know) that the traditional MBR can only boot from
a primary or extended partition's boot record, not a logical
partition's boot record.  But Grub and LILO can chainload from any of
those.

I often have several Linux installations on a system.  There are at
most 4 primary partitions, and at most 3 if there is an extended
partition.  MS Windows typically takes 1 or 2 primary partitions (one
for the NTFS filesystem and one for the restore partition).  So some
of my Linux installations end up in logical partions.

Why do I have multiple Linux installations?  Because I almost never
upgrade an installation -- I create a parallel installation of the
newer version.  Then, if the new one is unsatisfactory, I can still
run the old one.
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