Installing Windows on a partition whithout killing my MBR...

Coume · Guru Joined: 11 Jun 2004 Posts: 306

Hello,

Ok, don't blame me, but I really have to installl windows on a spare partition to test my tuner card... That's the only way for me to know if it's dead or not...

But I heard that installing windows when you have linux installed is a pain and it could damage my grub. Any idea or info on the steps to follow to install this great "windows" lol

Ludo
P.S.: I cant believe that I have to reinstall windows on a computer... 2 years without windows and has to install it for testing a card out

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Malakin · Posted: Mon Jun 21, 2004 7:34 pm Post subject:

Why not just take it to a friends place who uses windows and stick it in their system? Would be a lot easier.

Coume · Guru Joined: 11 Jun 2004 Posts: 306

nein · Guru Joined: 14 Nov 2003 Posts: 346 Location: Spain

I use lilo so i am not sure of this but you can probably boot with the gentoo boot cd and reinstall grub by mounting the partition where the grub config file is and telling grub to use that config file.

You can also save and restore your MBR manually but:

BE CAREFULL IF I MADE TYPO OR IF YOU MAKE ONE YOU CAN WIPE YOUR HARDDISK:

You can save your MBR (including the partition table) with this command (it saves to a file the first 512 bytes of the hda disk)

polle · Veteran Joined: 28 Feb 2003 Posts: 1498 Location: Belgium

You can always decide to instal grub again afterwards.
I used before Boot Magic to dualboot linux and windows. (grub was installed in the bootpartiton of linux)
One day I decided to get rid of boot magic, simply booted from the instalation cd installed grub in the mbr and adjusted the grub.conf
everything worked fine

Captain Sumo · Posted: Tue Jun 22, 2004 11:24 am Post subject:

I installed Windows 98 to my Gentoo machine a couple of weeks ago, so I can tell you my experience with Win9x, as far as it goes. From what I could tell, every Win9x version thinks it has a god-given right to do what it wants to your MBR, no questions asked. There's not a lot you can do to preserve it as it is.

As long as you don't trash your Gentoo partition(s), have kept your kernels in a safe place, and you have a way of booting back into Gentoo (live cd, boot floppies etc), you can always get back come back there later and re-install your chosen boot manager. I was using LILO, but I can't see why Grub would be any different in this respect.

One more thing. I do hope that the partition you want to put windows in is on your first hard disk. Whatever happens, Windows wants an active DOS partition on the first hard disk to write to during the installation, and abandons the setup if if can't find one. If your free partition is on another disk, then you are going to have to make space on two disks to do this.

I haven't tried this with NT/2000/XP, but I guess these OS's also think they own the MBR.
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