Also, XP install discs pre-SP2 will not read a disk that large. You
would need to slipstream your disc with the SP2 or SP3 installer. This
is documented on the microsoft website somewhere (good luck!) but it's
also all over the internet. A few searches should reveal the details to
you.
As far as windows blowing out your MBR, that's easily fixable with some
work ahead of time. Get a bootable linux cd, and use 'dd' to back up the
first 440 bytes of your disk (not partition). After windows does it's
thing, boot up your cd, and restore that 440 bytes. Then, just configure
your bootloader to chainload to windows.
To backup your MBR:
dd if=/dev/hda of=/backup.bin bs=440 count=1
To restore:
dd if=/backup.bin of=/dev/hda bs=440 count=1
Sample GRUB stanza for windows:
title Windows
rootnoverify (hd0,1)
makeactive
chainloader +1
boot
On all of these examples, of course adjust the drive paths (and grub ID)
as appropriate for your system. The 'makeactive' is optional, but grub
somehow marks the windows partition as 'active' without actually editing
your MBR. Sometimes windows requires this to boot, and it doesn't hurt
to leave this in either way.
On Sat, 2009-04-11 at 12:24 -0400, Chris Mathey wrote:
> Eben King wrote:
> > I got a 312 GiB (marketed as "320 GB") SATA drive and a USB case. My
> > aim is to use it as a bootable backup for my 78 GiB / 80 GB internal
> > drive, and also to hold XP. To that end, I partitioned it as follows:
> >
> > partition mount point size
> > 1 / backup 15.5 GiB
> > 2 swap 2.3 GiB
> > 3 /usr backup 4.2 GiB
> > 4 extended 276.9 GiB (eg the rest of the disk)
> > 5 /home backup way too big ... I'll deal with that
> > 6 XP 49.9 GiB
> > (more unpartitioned space)
> >
> > So the XP installer complains there's no XP-compatible partition
> > available, but it won't say what it wants. Good design, folks.
> > Anyone know what it wants? I tried making it "bootable" and also
> > setting the same flag for partition 6, no go. I deleted and recreated
> > the partition using XP's own utility, no dice. Does it need to be
> > primary? The first, $DEITY forbid? Can I make it like it wants it,
> > then use gparted to move it to where I want it?
> >
> > And fdisk complains for partitions 1-4 that "Partition N does not end
> > on cylinder boundary.". I guess that for each of those, I need to
> > note what cylinder it ends on now, delete then remake it so it ends on
> > a cylinder boundary. Unless there's a way to clean it up
> > non-destructively?
> >
> Basically you can't install XP on a non primary partition. I believe you
> already know you can only do 4 primaries on one disk (logical beyond that).
> Possible workaround? :
> http://www.sousuke.org/wiki/Installing_Windows_on_a_logical_partition
>
>
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