Re: windows XP NTFS\redhat 7.2

[Tom Lane]

I said:
> I'm having no luck getting GRUB to boot Win XP Pro ...

I've got it working.  The magic ingredient seems to be to make sure that
WinXP is installed in a primary partition.  Which, for some reason, XP's
own installer tends not to do.

Here's what I actually did:

1. Boot Red Hat 7.2 install CD, use its partition management to wipe all
existing partitions and set up the partition set that I wanted,
including a primary partition for WinXP (which I marked as type ext2 for
lack of a better idea).  Abort the install after the
partitioning/formatting step.

2. Boot Windows XP install CD.  It refused to reformat the partition
I'd made in step 1, so I had instead to tell it to delete and recreate
that partition as an NTFS partition.  Then finish the install normally.

3. Again boot RH install CD; reformat the existing Linux partitions
(just for paranoia's sake); tell it to install GRUB in the boot
partition, not on the MBR; complete the install.

4. This left me with a working system that would autoboot into Windows,
since Windows had set the partition table to mark its own partition as
active (bootable).  I used sfdisk to mark the boot partition as active
(sfdisk -A1 /dev/hda) and I had a working dual-boot system.

In hindsight I could probably have allowed the Linux install to complete
in step 1, and saved myself the time to reboot and reformat.  I saw no
evidence that the Windows installer mucked with the other pre-set-up
partitions.  It does, however, mark its install partition as active,
so you'd better remember to make a Linux boot floppy so you can get
back into Linux to run sfdisk.

I am not sure why GRUB can chain to WinXP's boot code when WinXP is in a
primary partition, but not when it's in a logical partition.  Might be
something for the GRUB maintainers to look into.

I'm also not sure exactly what the conditions are under which WinXP's
installer will create a logical rather than primary partition for
WinXP.  But preallocating all four primary partition slots, as I did
this time, seems to prevent that from happening.

                        regards, tom lane