dual boot Xubuntu and XP

[sandaili]

I had XP installed on the first hard drive, and installed Xubuntu on the second drive. I made one swap partition on the 2nd hd for swap, in fat32 (not sure if that was good idea or not) and of course the Xubuntu is installed on a 9GB partition formatted for linux (what is it again, ex3 or ext3??)...

Obviously I am very new to all of this.

The installer for Xubuntu was the regular one and not the one that "asks" you where you want to put grub. However, there was a part that said, "Where do you want to install GRUB to..." it wasn't specific but it asked for a hard drive. By default it said (hda0).

I tried that, but it said it couldn't. Did I make a mistake, because maybe I should have typed (hda0,0) ???? Is that what I did wrong?

So anyway, I didn't feel like trying that and screwing something up, without knowing for sure, so I searched around in forums and saw that people said you could put it in the partition you installed linux in. So, since that's the 4th partition, it went to (hd1,4) I hope that was correct.

Of course, that meant that I will have to change my boot order if I want any hope of running that Xubuntu, right?

OR...

I am trying to figure out how I can do this right. I really do want to avoid writing to the MBR. I want to use Grub4dos. But I am not sure how.

If anyone can help me or has a suggestion (or knows that I did the first part wrong, if perhaps I had to type something different than (hd0) for it to write over the MBR if I want it to.....I just don't know WHERE or WHAT to do at this point.

Thanks so much...

L

[Inigoesdr]

It's ext3. The hard drives are labeled in hd + letter + partition number, aren't they? hda1 hdb2 etc. As far as dual-booting there are literally tons of sites that tell you how to do it, but I don't recall seeing any that use grub4dos(which is still in beta and not really documented). Most tell you to use a LiveCD and overwrite the MBR, so that's probably not going to help you much. In theory you should be able to setup grub on your linux drive but it would have to be the primary master drive(or selected by CMOS). Good luck though! You might also want to try the Ubuntu forums, or other unofficial support sites(Search for them). =]

[ghell]

I use fedora not ubuntu so somethings may be different.

It probably only asks for a drive (eg hda) because it will install GRUB to the master boot record of that drive, not to a partition on it. hda is the primary drive and probably where your windows boot loader already is.

I have used Grub4Dos a lot in the past (actually grub for nt loader with windows xp aka grldr) You use it as follows:
- put grldr on your windows C:\ drive.
- edit your boot.ini (its read only, hidden and system so you will have to that off while editing, and its a good idea to set it back when done) so that it has C:\grldr="Start GRUB" on a new line at the bottom, underneath the windows xp line in the [operating systems] section.
- create a blank text file called C:\menu.lst and put in it what would normally go in your grub.conf/menu.lst for example:

title Xubuntu
root (hd0,0)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.15-26-386 root=/dev/sda1 ro quiet splash
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.15-26-386(where hd0,0 is your boot partition) I don't know what this line actually looks like for xubuntu, because I don't use it :P I got this from screenshotting an oldish virtual ubuntu 6.06 box running on vmware. you will need to adjust the kernel version and architecture to yours (here I am using kernel version 2.6.15-26 with the i386 distro of ubuntu, and its on a scsi drive which is why its sda1 not IDE's hda1. SATA also uses sda1) and change the root to the correct partition.

Note that hd0 is the first disk, and hd0,0 is the first partition on that disk. So the 4th partition on the 2nd disk would be hd1,3

Also, in fedora at least, it gives SWAP as a partition type for /swap