1 Topic by deros68

  • deros68
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  • Registered: 2007-04-06
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Topic: Have gentoo installed - want to add XP dual boot

Hope this post is not a repeat..

have 80G hd with gentoo running well I want to dual boot it with XP - not Vista

layout of HD was

/dev/sda1   ext2      boot       < boot flag set   use LILO boot loader
/dev/sd2                 swap
/dev/sda3   ext3      all else

all space was allocated


so I used GPARTED (live cd 0.3.4) to resize as follows:

/dev/sda1   ext2      boot
/dev/sd2                 swap
/dev/sda3   ext3      all else
/dev/sda4   NTFS     40 gig      < boot flag set   

all space is allocated

Darn - I cannot install XP - been a while - forgot MS boot limitations

tried deleting  NTFS partition & shifitng all other partitions down - failed - cannot move the /dev/sda1 to the right  the other 2 partitions moved fine (hmm.. left boot flag on - maybe that prevents the move ?)  my goal was to get enough space to add a NTFS parition as p1 or p2 in first 1024cyl

tried hiding the first 3 partitions - nope cannot hide them - but I can hide ntfs partition
have plenty of space on the drive

any suggestions on how to add XP to this box - I do not want to destroy the
gentoo build I worked so long on -so I want to keep it

thanks

deros68

2 Reply by LarryT

  • LarryT
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  • From: France (Bretagne)
  • Registered: 2006-07-31
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Re: Have gentoo installed - want to add XP dual boot

No problem is quite different. I must say there is nothing to do with GParted and I wonder if this is a question for our forum :-/
Anyway to solve your problem you *must* destroy mbr, so windows can see the hard drive geometry.
Here come the problem : when installing linux-grub-lilo, mbr is set by linux to see the hard drive geometry ; but windows doesn't see *THIS* geometry.
So you need to destroy mbr ( = destroy all data on your drive !!!), then install xp, then install gentoo back.

Since it is sad, you could do this :
make a backup image of your ext3 partition, using clonezilla ;
take as much details as you can of your current hard drive layout.
delete the mbr (dd if=/dev/null of=/dev/sda bs=512 count=1)
Boot off GParted create your partitions, reboot with XP cd and it will do the trick !
Then restore your gentoo partitions, then reinstall your bootloader adding xp entry.

I don't know any other workaround ATM.
I did it a couple of days and it worked very well. I hade having exactly the same problem you mention.
Not sure my explanation is clear enough, but one more time : not sure this the right place to get such info :-p

Larry
GParted-project Admin
Former GParted-LiveCD maintainer (2007)