Re: Dual boot

[Kent West <westk@acu.edu>]

Michael Satterwhite wrote:

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> Has anyone set up Debian on a machine that dual boots with Win2K? If so, are 
> there any "gotchas" that I ought to be aware of?
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>  

I've done it several times, with no real issues.

I've also done it several times with WinXPPro, but just this week I've 
been fighting such a beast on a Dell GX270 that is causing me no end of 
grief.

First, the video chipset doesn't appear to be supported in the version 
of X shipping in unstable; the best I can do is 640x480 at decent color 
depth, or 8-bit color at 1024x768.

Secondly, and more to your question, I've got a 2GB partition with 
DOS/Win95 (Win95 doesn't run except in Safe Mode on these machines, btw, 
I guess because of hardware being too new), followed by a 15GB partition 
with WinXPPro, followed by a 15GB spare partition (was going to 
experiment with VMWare), followed by several Linux partitions (/, usr, 
usr/src, etc (no, I mean 'et cetera', not '/etc' :-)  )).

I can get all the OSes installed and working, but as soon as I run lilo 
to fix the mbr, WinXP becomes unbootable; the drive letter changes from 
D: (which is how WinXP installed) to E:. I've been unable to repair XP 
in any way except to do a clean install. The clean install works fine, 
until I re-run lilo to fix the mbr, and then the drive letter in XP 
shifts again and XP again becomes unbootable.

I know it's not really the hardware's fault, but it sure is easy to 
blame it, because I can't run X on it, it won't run Win95, and I can't 
keep Debian and WinXP on it (not that _I_ want XP on the box, but it 
needs to be multiboot for Helpdesk purposes, which is where the PC is 
going). Stupid Dell.

--
Kent