HOWTO: Dual boot XP & BT (With LILO)

[killnine]

Hey guys,
I finally got my harddrive setup working and I wanted to share how to do it. Because a lot of other howto's on this forum are straight jacked from other distributions (and they didn't work for me), I thought I would write this up real quick. This is V1.0 so hopefully it wont have any bugs, if it does, just reply or PM me.

This tutorial assumes a few things

1. You first installed XP
2. Now you want to install BT
3. You want to save your XP install but want BT too
4. You only have one hard drive, but have partitioned it
5. Your lazy ass doesn't wanna swap floppies to get boot files onto your C: drive for NTFSloader

Step 1: So first, you have to have XP on your machine

Step 2: Use a disk partitioning tool like Partition Magic (usually free with new hard drives) to cut up a partition for BT. Make it EXT2 so that you can actually boot to it and write to it from Linux.

Step 3: Load the BT CD and install to hard drive. MAKE SURE TO INSTALL TO YOUR PARTITION FOR BT! DONT OVERWRITE YOUR XP PARTITION! As for where to write LILO, just let it write to /dev/hda1 or your master drive.

Step 4: Once you have written BT to your hard drive, you pretty much cannot access your XP partition anymore. But fret not! We will soon have it back. Just go back into your newly installed BT, get to a command prompt and type this in:

$: liloconfig

This is going to lead you through installing your windows info onto your boot loader. Just choose the simple session, then click enter, then install to your master boot record. It will give you an error, but thats cool. You will now be kicked backed to console

Step 5:

Now type this into console:

$: nano /etc/lilo.conf

This will open up your newly created information that you will boot from. What you did earlier created this file. However, if you leave some permissions to how they are, your shizzle isn't going to boot and you will get tons or 'cannot write to....' errors and stuff is just going to be a nightmare. Therefore, scroll way down to where is says #Linux bootable partition config begins. Change it to this:

# Linux bootable partition config begins
image = /boot/vmlinuz
root = current
label = back|track
read-write
# Linux bootable partition config ends

That last part is very important. Its on the "TRIBOOT" howto, but it doesn't really make a big deal out of it. If you dont make it read-write, your system wont boot correctly. Damn, thats annoying because you have to reinstall.

Step 6:

The last thing you have to do is initiate LILO, or whatever. This pretty much sets everything in place for when you next boot. Just type this into your console:

$lilo

You should get something telling you that you have two choices, Windows* and Back|Track. The star, I believe means its new, or something. You got me *shrug*. However, this should allow you to dual boot to either partition.



Conclusion: Now this pretty much lays it out for people who JUST WANT BT on their box with XP. The triboot Howto is good but this just lays it out for all those folks (like me) that just need 2 confusing OSs on their computer.

[hobbes]

Way to go, killnine, looks like you really learned a lot doing this. Thanks for putting up a howto, I'll add it to the collection.

[killnine]

The next one on my list of "To-Do"s is installing open office on a HD install of BT. After all, I am sure a lot of us are students or faculty that need to at least read Microsoft's silly documents =D. Look forward to that sometime soon (though I have finals now....)

[saratis]

i must say this one looks a lot like my reply i posted yesterday...

being: this

Maybe we could merge them to make it even better. I think my post goed in a bit more detail which can be useful for some people....

[hobbes]

Originally Posted by saratis

i must say this one looks a lot like my reply i posted yesterday...

being: this

Maybe we could merge them to make it even better. I think my post goed in a bit more detail which can be useful for some people....

Some of the notes on troubleshooting were helpful, yes, but you omitted an important step which was to include the 'read-write' line in the linux config section. This is essential to avoiding boot errors.

[killnine]

Yeah, sorry for flooding the forum with this, maybe we can combine threads or whatever. If you wanna just ammend yours, I can get an admin to remove this thread. We should probably just give props to all the people who have helped contribute to making a Howto on this subject. I just figured that the Triboot one wasn't the end-all be all tutorial. So, i did what worked for me

[waqapak]

i followed your specific instructions but then afterwards when I type in lilo i get this message :

Fatal: raid_setup: stat("tmpfs")

so i posted on this forum and XATAR solved the problem (thanks again)


Right, the problems that most of you are having is that you do not configure the lilo.conf file to add your windows operating system into it. the configuration file defines exactly what lilo (linux loader) does when it runs.

For those that can only access their backtrack OS:

Boot into backtrack.
Open a terminal window.

nano /etc/lilo.conf

Change boot to: boot = /dev/hda
Change root to: root = /dev/hda2
Change read-only into read-write

Alter the root = /dev/hda2 line to reflect what partition you have installed backtrack onto, most likely your hda2 partition.

At the bottom of the file, add:

other = /dev/hda1
label = WindowsXp

Save the file ( CTRL-X, yes to save changes, save as lilo.conf)

Execute:

lilo -v

You should see a response indicating that the windows OS has been added.

Now reboot your machine! This time, you should be presented with a LILO menu, select whatever OS you want to boot and press enter.

[saratis]

Originally Posted by hobbes

Some of the notes on troubleshooting were helpful, yes, but you omitted an important step which was to include the 'read-write' line in the linux config section. This is essential to avoiding boot errors.

hmm, worked for me, maybe it was there already, but i still think we should merge the two posts and make it easy to find, sticky like...

ive added the read-write part to my post as wel...

[michelinok]

This tutorial is GREAT!
Thanks!

This post must be a "sticky"!!!!!

[thenightfly]

Excellent stuff,

Very concise and informative, got it working after 2 gos. Just thought id mention a few things in relation to my installation...

I had left about 10 Gigs on my laptop leftover for backtrack but I couldnt find a working evaluation of partition magic.

Heres how I setup my partition using fdisk on my single 60GB disk.

1. Boot from backtrack
2. login
3. run fdisk on /dev/hda (Your primary hard disk)
4. set up another partition called hda2 (hda1 is your xp partition)
5. write the partition details
6. this partition must be formated for linux so run mke2fs /dev/hda2
7. Reboot backtrack
8. This partition should now be visible to backtrack
9. Run the backrack installer
10. Write backtrack files to /dev/hda2
11. Write LILO to /dev/hda
12. Follow the rest of killnines tutorial

I'm sorry if this might be very obvious to most of you but it might spare some people a lot of hassle !