Dear Charles, Looks to me like your problem is XP. I'll have to admit that I've never used XP (and with luck, maybe I never will), but from my experiences with Windows 98 & ME, I've found that Windows will insist on installing itself on the first primary partition of the first drive (in other words, /dev/hda1) and will overwrite whatever was there. So I don't see how you could force it to install on the "spare partition" you made by moving /home. Whatever was on /dev/hda1 probably got overwritten, and I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft deliberately gave the XP installer the ability to overwrite any non-Windows partitions as well. I do know that W2K is a little more amenable to other operating systems (at least it does not insist on being installed on /dev/hda1).
>From my experience, I find GRUB to be an excellent boot manager, and it's unlikely that LILO would have saved you from the ravages of XP's installation program. If you do want to run XP, you ought to install it first and then install Linux. regards, Robert Storey On 21 Dec 2001 10:48:52 -0500 Charles Galpin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I'm not sure why, but I'll blame my friend Tom (and the fact that in > some sick way the Fisher Price look and feel attracted me) I considered > installing windows XP on a spare partition I made by moving /home. Being > adventurous and not entirely happy with w2k I decided to do it. > > Well, XP did it's thing and took control of the MBR. No prob, I booted > off my boot floppy, ran grub-install and rebooted. > > Somehow XP booted instead of w2k when I chose the w2k menu (had not > added XP choice yet). > > So, I rebooted and added a choice for XP. and tried to beef up my > existing config with options like hid/unhide/makeactive. > > I tried to look for a tool that could verify my grub.conf before > rebooting, but found none. I wasn't worried since I had the boot floppy. > > Well, when I rebooted, grub said it didn't like the partitions I was > referencing. So on the grub command line I tried a few things - hiding > and unhiding partitons etc. The grub shell is rather powerful and has > tab completion etc. It was after mucking around in grub that I found i > could no longer see my partitons!! > > I tried to boot of the floopy and got a kernel panic. I booted off the > resuce CD, and fdisk revealed all my partitions were gone except for a > little 32MB partition up front which dell puts on - it's partiton type > had been changed. > > So, I'm not sure what went wrong, or who to blame, but I don't think > grub helped. I like to think this would not have happened with lilo. > > Again, XP was involved and I'm very suspicious of it. > > Good thing it was a fresh install. :) > > charles > _______________________________________________ Redhat-list mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/redhat-list
