Re: dual booting

[Tom Pfeifer <tplists@optonline.net>]

David Jardine wrote:

> > Yes, Windows thinks its the only thing in the world and must be installed
> > first. So you must create a partition for it first.
> 
> Is this really true or just a self-perpetuating myth?
> I'm not much good at getting anything to work at all on
> my Debian/Windows machine, but - at least with slink and
> potato - I had no trouble booting with hda1=swap, hda2=
> Debian and hda3=Windows.  Perhaps because it's a small
> hard disk (1,2 GByte)?

It's true for some Windows versions (in particular Win9X/ME) in the
sense that those versions overwrite the MBR when installed. So in that
case it's more convenient to install Windows first, even though it's
overwriting of the MBR is not difficult to recover from if prepared. But
Win2K, from what I've seen installing it,
doesn't overwrite the MBR, so the install order makes little difference. 

Putting the Win2k partition first on the drive is not neccessary at all.
It can be booted from a primary partition located anywhere on the drive.
This wasn't true with some of the older Windows versions  - for example
I believe WinNT needed to be within the first 2 GB and Win95 (original)
within the first 8 GB.

Tom