Dual boot not happening

Hi

I tried to install Linux on a system which already had Win Xp on it on NTFS partitions ...
It was a 80 GB HDD with around 9 partitions ..
I deleted the last partition and tried to create linux partitions , it did not allow me to do that saying that the boot partition > 1024 cylinders ..
i then used fdisk to create these partitions and installed Linux ..
but when i rebooted i found that i only had linux boot option , windows bot option had gone .There was no option during install as to whether i need a dual boot or no , or which boot loader i need (usually it asks) ..

I has to reinstall Xp and now i have only XP boot option ... I have a Linux Bootable floppy .. so i can live , but i want to know how to make it a dual boot ...
REd Hat Linux 7.1
Regards
Maxmelbin

 

Hey maxmelbin,
what happen is your Red Hat 7.1 is some old now.

Don't know for sure, but probably is using LILO as bootloader and that limits the root partition to be before the 1024th cylinder.

That means your last partition is too far from the disk beggining to install that Linux.

Now you have fallen back your system so no further help is need it. But considering your situation, I would choose another Linux distribution.

That's totally personal. If you want to consider my opinion, I would say:

Debian, definitely not.
Mandrake is very good. http://www.linuxiso.org/distro.php?distro=29
Suse, probably the best, but is not possible to download it for free over the net.
Conectiva is the one: ftp://ftp.unicamp.br/pub/conectiva/iso/
- Red Hat based
- good drivers (the only one worked my Nvidia card in one shot)
- lots of Windows codecs
- plays DVDs!! (Suse does not, you have to patch it)
- read and write stable support for NTFS partitions

Another tip: do not use Fedora. After Red Hat has gone only payed, they left a very buggy and non friendly system -- my opinion, of course.

Probably all of them would handle your >1024 cylinder problem and boot both Linux and WinXP.

 

I got my Linux from web site downloads and have never ran into the 1024 cylinder limit. Modern Linux distros have overcome this problem already and I agree with Dago that RH 7.1 may be too old. My RH is version 9. In Lilo if it accepts "lba32" then the 1024 limit has been solved.

To include Windows for dual boot, assuming it is in the first primary partition is to add the following lines

If RH 7.1 uses Grub then it will have /boot/grub/menu.lst. Edit this file to append these 3 lines

title This is my Windows XP
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
chainloader +1

If RH 7.1 uses Lilo as bootloader then it will has /etc/lilo.conf. Append these two lines to this file

other=/dev/hda1
label="Windows_XP"

 

thanx guys ..
i will a get a later version of RH ..

and i will modify the lilo.conf file in case i run into trouble again ..

Max