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Dual booting win98, xp, and linux

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  • Dual booting win98, xp, and linux

    I'm trying to put those three OS's onto my system. I divided my single hard drive into a primary partition, c:, and two logical, d: and e:

    First, I installed win98 onto c:. Then I put winxp onto d:. Everything worked fine. When I try to put linux onto the logical drive e: however, it won't make a /boot partition. It says it can't make the partition primary? Anyone able to help me with this? Thanks.

  • #2
    What distro are you trying to install?
    p-two.net

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    • #3
      redhat 7.2

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      • #4
        If you choose GRUB as your bootloader you shouldn't need to make a seperate /boot partition. If you really need a /boot partition you should place it before the first existing partition on your hard drive, which means you'll have to resize your windows partition. I've always used lilo on the mbr to boot, even when I used to dual boot, but redhat (for a reason known only to them) keep shipping with an outdated version of lilo that can't boot a linux partition that lives above cyl 1024. Grub dosn't have this problem however.
        p-two.net

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        • #5
          It turns out it won't let me create any partitions for some reason:( Not just boot.

          I was fine installing linux by itself on the hard drive. Is there something else I should know about dual booting when using a single hard drive partitioned into 2 extra logical drives?

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          • #6
            Have a look at the Partition-HOWTO.
            p-two.net

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            • #7
              There's the "manual" way to set up a computer to multi boot, but it takes knowing how systems, particularily OS's work and more important, what won't work.

              Take a look at www.v-com.com web site. I have their newest updated System Commander ver 7.04. I boot into Windows XP, Widows ME, Linux Mandrake 8.2, or Lycoris /LX Linux if I want to. They control the MBR and also make copies of the boot record and MBR just in case someting goes haywire. I 've used that sofware to resize partitions, make new partitions, move free space from one partition to another to increase the size of that partition, etc etc.. all pretty simple and flawless. Especially nice is how to increase the size of one partition from unused space from another partition.. It goes through a series of steps, and one of them is to re-align the extended partition head. This is important, because anytime you change the structure of the primary or extended partions, it has to re-alighn the head on the hard drive to the new "space" it starts to look for the extended partition. Else things simply won't work.

              Give it a try.. I've done things using System Commander I never thought possible.. it's able to boot dozens of Operatins Systems if you have the Hard Drive capacity to do it, and their documentation covers what are specific reaquirements for each OS.

              Hope this is of some help.

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