Women in Technology

Article:		Creating a Dual-Boot Windows XP and Ubuntu Laptop
Subject:		Comment and Question
Date:		2006-09-19 09:36:23
From:		tward
Hi, I have a comment first that I believe is correct, if you follow the steps outlined above each time a new Kernel update is issued you will have to at least recreate the boot.img file is that right? Just something people should know since Ubuntu kernel updates are pretty frequent. My question: I have a Dell D810 laptop and have been using Ubuntu for over a year and am pretty happy. BUT I have never been able to use GRUB as my bootloader (I use LILO). What happens (and it happend in Breezy and in Dapper) is GRUB works fine until after I have booted into windows, once I do that, GRUB is toast. It either freezes the system or continually reboots the system when GRUB tries to load. Any ideas what this problem is? I guess one other thing to be aware of is with my LILO boot loader the FAT partition was not mountable in windows (because it was always marked inactive) until I added the flag: "activate" to my lilo.conf for the fat partition when booting windows. Setting the partition active with parted didn't work as it would be reset upon reboot. Don't know if there might be similar issues with GRUB. Thanks Ted Ward

Showing messages 1 through 2 of 2.

• Comment and Question
  2006-09-21 12:58:33  Kevin Farnham | [View]
  
  
  Ted -- I can't be certain about what's happening. One guess is that Windows is noticing "foreign" files in the boot area of the disk and is automatically altering or removing some of the files to protect you against invading malware. But then it would seem that something similar would happen when you use LILO on your system, but LILO works fine.
  
  I had a problem where Windows immediately overwrote GRUB when it saw it on an HP desktop I was turning into a dual-boot system. My solution in that case was to make a floppy disk to boot into Linux (Red Hat 8.0), and let Windows boot normally if the floppy was not in the drive. I describe this in my "Adventures in Migrating to New Linux Distributions" at http://www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/linux/2005/04/07/distroswap.html
  
• Comment and Question
  2007-04-23 12:36:03  bammitt [View]
  
  
  Hi Kevin,
  I was wondering if you could provide a link to the utility or the steps you used to create a floppy disk to boot into Linux or let Windows boot normally if the floppy was not in the drive.
  I read you linked article "Adventures in Migrating to New Linux Distributions" and have been looking for such a way to dual boot but have not had the success in finding it that you seem top have had.
  
  Thanks.