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grub and windows

 
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Hi - Has any one here ever:
a) Installed a dual boot Win/Linux system with grub installed on MBR
and then later
b) Reinstalled Win from boot CD without destroying grub/linux.
If so, I'd like a brief description or URLs please.
Just curious about grub .......
Later, Guy
[ April 06, 2002: Message edited by: Guy Allard ]
 
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As far as I understand it, the Windows install process is somewhat "heavy handed" about the MBR and installs its own boot loader there whether you want it or not.
The recommended process seems to be to make sure you have a Linux boot floppy before the Windows reinstall, use it to boot from, the re-run lilo/grub/whatever to reinstall your bootloader to the MBR.
It's clunky, but I have yet to find a better solution.
 
Guy Allard
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Frank - Thanks.
I have done this a number of times with lilo, and was just wondering if grub had a 'better' way. I recently spent some time looking through the grub user documentation, and it seems like a nice (i.e. powereful) loader.
I am on a campaign to get rid of floppies around my home LAN, but it seems like one or two are going to be essential for the near term future.
Thinking about Windows installs, 'heavy handed with the MBR' seems like a good phrase to me.
Regards, Guy
 
Frank Carver
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My way of getting rid of this problem was to give up dual-booting. Of course it means that I have a whole load of single-purpose machines hanging about in various states of repair; but at least I don't worry about rebooting to swich operating systems, or filesystem compatibility issues, or MBR upgrade woes ....
 
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Frank is correct. I am successful with Win 2000(NTFS) and RedHat Linux 7.2 dual boot with GRUB (at MBR)and Win 2000 as default(17 GB for Windows and 11 GB for Linux).
Next, I Installed Windows Service Pack 2 then windows 2000 stopped working. I did fixboot and fixmbr then windows working....but linux need floppy to boot, it looks like if you install any windows OS related stuff, there will be some impact on MBR. So i suggest 2 ways:
1. Install all windows components (including SP) then install Linux with GRUB at MBR.
2. Choose LILO at boot partition and ntloader for dual booting (I changed boot.ini).
 
Guy Allard
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suneel - I typically use lilo, but with NTLDR as boot manager.
Frank is surely right about 1 OS per machine, but ... sometimes that is just not possible.
Guy
 
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