Dual-Booting Linux & NT Without NT Boot Loader

Patrick McGouirk asks: "I work in a mixed-OS house, and need to have both Windows NT and Linux installed on my laptop. While everyone in this situation knows about the Linux+NT mini-Howto, I was installing SuSE 6.4 this weekend and accidentally did something that seems to have created an alternative solution. I installed NT as usual (hda1, primary) then installed SuSE (hda2, primary) + swap, as well as a third shared FAT32 partition (hda3, primary). I put lilo on hda2, but while fooling around with YaST2 I made hda2 active by accident. When I rebooted lilo came up with the choices of Linux or NT, which I have switched back and forth several times this weekend with no apparent problems. While in theory I knew that both Linux and NT care less about which partition is active (as long as it's a primary), It never occured to me until now that you could actually change the active partition to dual-boot. My question is this. Does this seem a safe method of dual-booting? If so this solves the basic problem of everytime you update Linux you needed to copy the new lilo to NT's root drive. It also makes Linux your primary OS!" I'm running this one for all of the Linux/NT folks out there who didn't know about this trick.

How is this different from...

[ywwg]

I installed the NT boot loader in the _partition_, and lilo on the master boot record. It works flawlessly. Is one better than the other?

BTW, you said that you have a "shared" win32 partition. I thought winnt didn't support win32?

I've been doing this for ~1 year...

[Lupulack]

And I've had no troubles. The upside is that if you're like me and have a spare machine to experiment on, you have a bootloader that can handle non-ms os choices.

I've had BeOS, Solaris, Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Win2000, Win98 on that machine and LILO can handle them all ... a far cry from the NT bootloader method ( which involves creating a custom boot-sector for each OS as a file )

BTW, if you try Win2000, it requires its own custom boot sector ... if you install LILO in the MBR, W2k won't boot ... but with LILO on the partition boot sector, things work just peachy!

Re:I've been doing this for ~1 year...

[jclarke]

BTW, if you try Win2000, it requires its own custom boot sector ... if you install LILO in the MBR, W2k won't boot ... but with LILO on the partition boot sector, things work just peachy!

That's interesting.. because just two days ago, I installed rh6.2 on my new IBM Thinkpad 600X, then installed w2k professional on another partition, then reinstalled lilo with a rescue disk, added w2k to my lilo.conf, and everything works nice. Where/how/why does it need a "custom boot sector"?

Fun With Boot Loaders

[paulywog]

I've been doing that for a while, too.

What's even more fun is when you add the mbr of the second drive to your NT loader list, too.

Then you can boot and LILO comes up.
Select 'NT' and the NT loader comes up.
Select 'Linux' and LILO comes up.
back and forth all day long if you like...

;-)

I always do this on duel boots

[Elvii]

I got tired of reinstalling lilo, I've been doing this at least 1.5 years. Don't know if it's necessary, or even possibly wrong, but all I do is set lilo to install in hda? (linux part), make that partation active, and make sure i pass
table=/dev/hda

in lilo.conf. Always worked, and getting lilo back is as simple as fdisk in any os. Duel booted nt/95/98/etc this way



bash: ispell: command not found

Re:How is this different from...

[terminal.overload]

Well, actually it supports if you can grab FAT32 for NT at www.sysinternals.com/fat32.htm. The free version allows you to read, the full version allows read/write but u have to pay, of course. Works pretty good for a windowze solution but I prefer to compile my kernel with NTFS support. terminal.overload

OS/2 Boot Manager

[gonar]

simple, easy, works, lots of nice features and WAAAY retro.

I have had a system together using OS2 boot loader which would boot to any of the following OSs

os/2
dos/win 3.11
win95
winNT
linux

each OS was in it's own partition, but because of M$ stupidity, I had to play partition games, so that each of the M$ os's thought they were in C:
this ofcourse meant I couldn't share apps between the various flavors of windows.

os/2 had no problem being in D: in an extended logical partition, and linux went in an extended partition too.

of course, linux could see all the partitions, but couldnt mount the winNT/NTFS or OS/2 HPFS partitions.

Linux+NT the easy way

[IO ERROR]

Just install LILO to the boot sector of the partition, rather than to the MBR. (Most people should do this anyway.) LILO will boot NT just like it will boot Windos 9x. An example /etc/lilo.conf entry might be:

other=/dev/hda1
label=windoze

image=/boot/vmlinuz
label=Linux
read-only
root=/dev/hda6

Works beautifully. I have been using this to dual boot Red Hat and Windows 2000 for some time now.

ALSO: You can install LILO to the MBR with Windows 2000. I've also been doing this for some time now.
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Re:Boot Magic

[Dionysus]

Only problem is that BootMagic (at least the one I have) had to be installed on a Win9x system (FAT16/FAT32). Not a problem for me because I have a WIN98 partition for games, but something to think about if you only want NT and Linux (or any other combination not involving Win9x).

Multi-OS support on Intel

[DaveHowe]

Hmm. I have had a great deal of success with the "part" [intercom.com] boot loader - not just for the switching (which of course is good) but for working around the usual four-partition limit per HD.
--

Re:Boot Magic

[EverCode]

Yeah, that is true. However, once you make a boot floppy, you don't need the Win98 version anymore. Same with PM. It can all be run from boot floppy.

Fun!
"...we are moving toward a Web-centric stage and our dear PC will be one of

Boot Magic

[EverCode]

PowerQuest has a product called BootMagic that comes with Partition Magic. It is excellent software and very flexible. It can do most anything you want or need.

Just try to mange 5 OSes without it! This software makes it easy.

EverCode

"...we are moving toward a Web-centric stage and our dear PC will be one of

Power Boot to select boot partitions

[ables]

There's a utility called Power Boot (www.blueskyinnovations.com) that does on purpose what you did accidentally. You install as many OSes as you want on various partitions, and then Power Boot lets you pick which partition to boot from. Very simple and clever, and I've had no problems with it. You can also hide partitions from each other, which is useful if you're installing from an OEM cd. (Not that you would of course. That would be stealing. ;) It even will rename partitions to c: if that helps your os. I sound like a commercial, but I've been very impressed. I had Win95, DOS/Win31, and WinNT for a while, and now I just use Win98 and Debian.

Re:OS/2 Boot Manager

[gfecyk]

I have had a system together using OS2 boot loader which would boot to any of the following OSs

each OS was in it's own partition, but because of M$ stupidity, I had to play partition games, so that each of the M$ os's thought they were in C:

The OS/2 Boot Manager does a neat trick to the partition table entries. For each primary partition you select it will hide the others (change the partition's type) so it was "invisible".

The major problem with this trick is you can only have four primary partitions, one of which is the boot manager itself. This means only three primaries (or two and one extended partition) and current PCs can't boot from extended partitions without trickery like LILO, NT Bootloader, or what OS/2 does.

My answer to this problem at the time was just get a second hard drive and have it be a common drive between three OSes. That isn't always practical but it does work.