[tdm2004]

I hope someone can help. I have windows xp pro installed on a 160gb hard drive with 2 80gb partitions and a 40 gig hard drive on IDE 2 in which i have successfully installed Xandros 2.0 business edition. When the boot loader screen appears when booting, the only option is windows xp. never xandros! I have tried re-installing xandros several times with the same end result. I have read the manual several times and have searched google for answers but nothing that i have read says anything about installing xandros on a separate hard drive. Only that it will co-exist with xp on the same drive after re partitioning the free space. I DON'T WANT LINUX ON THE SAME DRIVE AS WINDOWS! Surely there is a way to do this. Is there something that I am overlooking? Please help!

[deviance99]

Sounds like you need to specify the boot partition you want to go from. If you installed Xandros on your second HD; then you are booting from your first, or you XP parition and not getting the Xandros bootloader.

You may want to see if your BIOS will let you select what hard drive to boot from; or, you might want to flop the hard drives master/slave setting so that the Linux is the master and WinXP is the slave. If you do that, you may need to reinstall Xandros, but windows XP won't have a problem.

[saikee]

It should be quite easy to boot the two with at least the following methods.

Method 1: using NTloader from XP to boot both XP and Xandros. see this thread for steps. The bit you want to see is explained by moderator Ned Slider. It is reasonably straight forward but requires you to copy the bootloader of Xandros. That may be an uphill struggle for you as you haven't been able to work on Xandros yet.

Method 2: Using Xandros bootloader to boot itself and XP. Xandros uses Lilo. I think your failure of dual boot lies with your apprehension of not allowing a Linux bootloader into MBR of the XP disk. You have to trust Xandros. Allowing a Linux bootloader into MBR is a reversible process but without it you have to beg Windows NTloader to boot it for you. Linux's way is much more superior and easier. (NTloader can boot a maximum of 10. Lilo can do 15 and sky is the limit for Grub)

Method 3 : Possibly the safest for you is to ask Xandros, during installation, to make a bootable disk for you. This is equivalent of putting Xandros bootloader into the floppy and your XP MBR is untouched like a virgin.

Method 4 : You can boot another Linux using a Live CD, the one that runs on CD without being installed in a hard disk, and change root to Xandros. You do this by create a temporary directory and mount the Xandros partition on it.

It doesn't matter where Xandros is installed but to boot a Linux you need a bootloader to do it. So either get Windows' NTloader to work for you or let Linux's Lilo to manage it in the MBR.

[tdm2004]

Thank you very much guys for the info! I'll try some of the advice and see if that will work for me. I previously booted Fedora Core 3 on the same drive with no problems but wanted to try Xandros as I was told it is a good Linux to start with for a beginner like me. The Xandros bootloader screen comes up on boot, but only has ( 1. Windows XP ) I'm not a quitter so i'll keep pluging away at it untill i get it.

I'll let you know what happens. Have a great day!!

[saikee]

This is the first time I know a Linux bootloader boot a non-Linux and forget its own!

None of my 32 Linux in the box does that including Xandros which addresses the Windows partitions by drive letters and in a normal user mode you can't even see the Linux partitions.

It is quite a nice distro but I find it more difficult to cope as it neither Linux nor Windows. I would rather stick with the main stream Linux so that the things I learn are reusable in other distros. It is desktop graphic is superb but so are Linare, Fedora, Ubruto, Mandrake to name a few