Dual-booting between Windows NT, 2000 and XP and Linux.

This is a new version of my tutorial, much simplified, since its original version thanks to the bootpart free software. It assumes that you have Windows XP, or 2000 installed in drive 0 (C:) of your machine and you are going to install Linux in a new blank hard-drive you just added to your machine as drive 1. You can see a similar tutorial at NewsForge.

• Install Fedora Core Linux

  Boot from the Fedora Core CD or DVD and install Linux in drive 1. See the installation tutorial for details in installing Linux, but be sure you install GRUB (the new Linux Loader) in the boot partition of the secondary IDE drive (hdb1), not in the master boot record (MBR) of the first hard drive (where Windows is) -- this is very important. Create a boot diskette during the installation, if asked -- this is also important for your mental sanity ...

• Create dual-booting in XP/2000
  1. restart your machine using control-alt-del (also works in Linux), remove the CD-ROM and let it boot in XP/2000

  2. open a browser and download bootpart to the root of your drive C: and unzip it there.

  3. go to the root of the drive C: and look for the file boot.ini, right-click on it and change properties removing the read-only check mark. Open boot.ini in Notepad and save it as boot-safe.ini

  4. type bootpart to see a list of the partitions in your hard-drive, as shown in the example below:

     C:\>bootpart
     Boot Partition 2.20 for WinNT (c) 1995-98 G. Vollant (info@winimage.com)
     WEB : http://www.winimage.com and http://www.winimage.com/bootpart.htm
     Add partition in the Windows NT Multi-boot loader
     Run "bootpart /?" for more information

     0 : C: type=b (Win95 Fat32), size = 1407136 KB
     1 : C:* type=7 (HPFS/NTFS), size = 1741824 KB
     2 : D:* type=83 (Linux native), size = 16600 KB
     3 : D: type=5 (Extended), size = 3136392 KB
     4 : D: type=83 (Linux native), size = 3070336 KB
     5 : D: type=5 (Extended), size = 66024 KB
     6 : D: type=82 (Linux swap), size = 65992 KB

     In the above example I had Windows 98 installed in the partition 0; Windows NT/2000/XP in partition 1; and Linux root in partition 4. Partition 2 is the Linux /boot partition, the partition which has GRUB installed (if you installed Linux like recommended above).

  5. At the C: prompt type bootpart 2 bootsect.lnx Linux to modify boot.ini and create the Linux boot record file.
     The 2 in the above bootpart command line corresponds to the partition 2, which in the example has GRUB installed. Change it accordingly to match the Linux boot partition in your case.

  6. check the changes made to boot.ini using bootpart list, as shown in the example below:

     C:\>bootpart list
     Boot Partition 2.20 for WinNT (c) 1995-98 G. Vollant (info@winimage.com)
     WEB : http://www.winimage.com and http://www.winimage.com/bootpart.htm
     Add partition in the Windows NT Multi-boot loader
     List entry in BOOT.INI

     0 : C:\bootsect.lnx="Fedora Core 4"
     1 : multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINNT="Windows XP"
     2 : C:\bootsect.f32="Windows 98"
     3 : multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINNT="NT Workstation [VGA mode]" /base video /sos

     By runnning "bootpart REMOVE <number>"
     where number is an entry number, you can remove the entry from C:\BOOT.INI

NOTE: You can also use bootpart to add other operating systems to the boot.ini file. In the above example the following line would add Windows 98 to boot.ini: