Member Avatar for rburke

I have a primary and secondary 80GB hard drives...I had issues on my secondary hard drive but was able to Ghost it and recover the data, which has been saved to the primary drive. I would now like to run dual OS's with XP on the primary and Linux on the secondary. My question is...Do I need to use a program such as partition magic in order to select the which OS to use during boot up?

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  • Latest Post Latest Post by setokaiba

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Brief, practical plan for the setup you described to and building on ’s note: there are two safe, common ways to dual-boot when each OS is on its own physical disk. One keeps the Windows disk untouched by putting the Linux bootloader on the second disk and using your BIOS/one-time-boot key to choose which disk to boot. The other installs GRUB to the primary MBR and presents a menu at startup. Pick the approach that matches how comfortable you are with restoring Windows if something goes wrong.

Checklist and installer choices: confirm which drive the BIOS calls first, and label the disks so you don’t overwrite data. During the Linux installer explicitly choose the secondary disk as the installation target and decide where to put the bootloader. Create at least a root partition and swap (make swap >= RAM if you plan to hibernate; otherwise 1–2GB is usually fine), and consider a separate /home if you want to preserve user data across reinstalls. Use stable filesystems (ext4 is a good default) and avoid reformatting the Windows disk unless you intend to.

Recovery and troubleshooting: if the Windows MBR is accidentally overwritten you can restore it from the Windows XP CD Recovery Console with fixmbr, fixboot, and bootcfg /rebuild. If GRUB fails to list Windows, run your distro’s grub update (for many distros update-grub or grub-mkconfig) or reinstall the bootloader from a live CD. Keep one rescue medium (Windows CD and a Linux live CD/USB) handy before you start.

For step-by-step details and edge cases (chainloading, GRUB vs GRUB2, BIOS vs UEFI differences), see the GRUB manual and a modern dual-boot walkthrough:

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Member Avatar for Tatootie

I have a primary and secondary 80GB hard drives...I had issues on my secondary hard drive but was able to Ghost it and recover the data, which has been saved to the primary drive. I would now like to run dual OS's with XP on the primary and Linux on the secondary. My question is...Do I need to use a program such as partition magic in order to select the which OS to use during boot up?

Linux will have a boot manager built in. Partician MAgic sure makes the Dbl OS easier, but it isnt necessary

peace

Member Avatar for setokaiba

u need to burn the comp


sike

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