Archived from groups: microsoft.public.windowsxp.general (
More info?)
Jacky Luk wrote:
> Hi,
> I don't like Linux bootloader and I want to get a third party one for my PC.
> Free of charge would be the best. I also dislike System commander too.
> Thanks
> Jack
>
>
Windows XP can do it. It's just a bit more painful than Linux. I have
one of my PC's set up that way. I am assuming from your statement that
you already have the system set up with Linux using either GRUB or LILO
as boot manager. First you will need to copy the Linux boot sector into
a file which will need to reside on the booting partition of your
Windows setup (C:\). If you have write access to a windows partition,
then open a command window in Linux and change to that partition to do
the following: from the command line in Linux, type the following command:
dd if=/dev/hda of=linux.dsk bs=512 count=1
If you don't have write access from Linux to a Windows partition (i.e.
it is ntfs), then create the file on a floppy or if you have a Linux
partition using ext2 or ext3 file system, use explore2fs from
http://uranus.it.swin.edu.au/~jn/linux/explore2fs.htm to copy it once
you have booted into Windows.
Substitute for "/dev/hda" if your Linux is not booting from the first
hard drive, and "linux.dsk" is the filename for the boot sector file.
Restore your Windows boot sector. A way do do this is by booting off of
a Win9x boot floppy and at the command prompt type: fdisk /mbr to
restore the master boot record.
Then boot into Windows XP. Once you have logged into Windows XP you
need to edit the file "boot.ini" as follows: At the command prompt
change to the root of c: (cd c:\ ENTER) type "attrib -h -r -s boot.ini"
without the quotes. Then edit boot.ini in your favorite text editor
(such as notepad) to add the following line at the end of the file:
C:\linux.dsk="Linux" Make sure the first line in the file has a timeout
long enough for you to select from the menu - Mine is set to 30 seconds
"timeout=30".
_Make_sure_you_don't_save_this_file_as_a_binary_using_Word!!!!
After saving the file, type "attrib +h +r +s boot.ini" to restore the
file's attributes. Now you are done, and the next time you boot you
will have a text-based menu to choose either Windows or Linux.
As you can see, this is somewhat painful. If you have access to the NT4
toolkit, you can use "DSKPROBE.EXE" to copy the Linux boot sector from
within Windows. Either that program or a similar utility is extremely
handy to have on hand since you will need to re-copy the Linux boot
sector every time you upgrade the kernel.
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