Partitioning Question

[nashot99]

I think I'm totally misunderstood here --

I DO NOT have Linux installed on USB drive. As mentioned in the first post itself:

Here is my config, sda and sdb both are SATA drives. Windows XP is installed on sda and Linux on sdb

sdb has the following partitions:
sda1 -- NTFS ~920GB
sdb2 -- linux-swap 4 GB
sdb3 -- fat32 6 GB
sdb4 -- ext4 70GB

[saikee]

May be we misunderstood you as inside an external drive the hard disk is likely 99% a Sata disk.

What you mean now is both your sda and sdb are "Internal" hard disks.

My explanation still stands. You think NTLDR will obey you, via boot.ini, and boots the Linux in disk (1) when Xp has been installed in Disk (0).

My experience is MS Windows boot loaders do have a problem booting a disk other than the one its boot loader has been residing. I can confirm having met such refusal before but I did not investigate it further or thoroughly.

What should be understood is the Xp's boot loader NTLDR was written mainly for MS systems. While it can be used to chainload a Linux the facility is never intended to work in every situation and combination.

[nashot99]

Thanks saikee

Probably I should have clarified that sda and sdb both are "internal" SATA drives

Again, I haven't tried this with SATA drives or XP before. However, I've done it without any issues with Windows 2000 and early versions of Fedora (5, 6) and with internal PATA drives, with windows on one drive and Fedora on the other.

I'd like to try creating a partition fro linux on sda, just to confirm our finding

[saikee]

If you were able to do it with Pata internal disks then you should be able to repeat the same for the Sata disk, especially MS Systems make no distinction between the two.

MS Windows boot loaders can be erratic in behaviour if used outside its original intention. Although Win2k and Xp share the same name for the boot loader the code is slightly different in the two. Win2k is known to have a problem of booting Xp but not the other way round.

I have tried using Vista's bootmgr to boot 150 Linux. It worked but failed on distros installed on disks other than the one where Vista residing. I recorded it here.

[CALLEIGH]

I used the Ubuntu text installer and went ahead and used the guided partitioner, it froze after partitioning about 17Gb, i can't find it in GParted or the Windows 7.

[saikee]

CALLEIGH,

The best way for others to advise you on partitions is to show the geometry of your hard disks by posting the output of the terminal command (in Ubuntu)

sudo fdisk -l

When partitioning a hard disk all the work is playing with 4x16 bytes in the partition table. Normally there is no possibility of a freeze up. May be you means formatting.

[drak00]

I'm new to this forum. After reading on this forum and some other internet forums regarding the dual boo with XP boot loader, I tried installing Ubuntu-11.04 over the weekend.

Here is my config sda and sdb botha are SATA drives. Windows XP is installed on sda.

sdb has the following partitions:
sda1 -- NTFS ~920GB
sdb2 -- linux-swap 4 GB
sdb3 -- fat32 6 GB
sdb4 -- ext4 70GB

I chose to install grub on /dev/sdb. After rebooted with rescue CD on USB pendrive and copied 512 bytes (to a file ubuntu.lnx) from /dev/sdb4 to fat32

1. Booted into XP,
2. copied ubuntu.lnx to c drive,
3. added option to boot inot Ubuntu to boot.ini and tried to boot into Ubuntu choosing the Ubuntu option, no luck, the moment I choose Ubuntu, the screen goes black with cursor blinking at let-top corner. Verified file name etc, no luck.

Finally, let grub install into /dev/sda and allowed grub to be th boot loader, it picked up XP installation and added that as an option. I, then,
1. booted into Ubuntu,
2. tried cd /boot and df -k . , it showed /dev/sdb4 as the partition it was on.
3. I again copied 512 bytes to fat32.
4. booted into XP, copied the latest file from fat32 to c drive, updated boot.ini
Now it probably deveoped cyclical dependency, booting again whenever I chose as follows GRUB->Windows->Ubuntu -- which is understood.

Have failed to understand though, the fact that even though Ubuntu and its /boot is on /dev/sdb4, why can't I boot into Linux updating XP boot loader


nashot99

regarding the second point I did not understand the step
I tried but did not show / dev / sdb4 as the partition it was on.

[michaelk]

ishouli & drak00,

Your replying to a thread based on Mandrake which is a very old and the instructions posted may not apply to current distributions or if you have a uefi BIOS. If you have specific questions you should start your own threads.

[rahulmittal79]

I think many Grub users can testify that Grub's stage1 can default to load stage2 if stage1.5 isn't found or problematic. Grub always issues a warning and states the lack of stage1.5 isn't fatal in the "grub-install" command.