# Xp/Linux dual operating system



## AllSeeing (Sep 18, 2003)

Hi all,
Situation:- 
I have XP installed on my master/primary drive (I have two hard drives), I instaled linux on the second, auto.
Problem:-
Linux's GRUB hijacked the boot prociedures, and is a strong suspect in the disaperance of the cdrom driver/s. I think that Linux wrote over the boot/mbr file(s) on the primary drive on instalation. 
Questions:-
1. If I choose to keep GRUB as the primary boot system, how do I make it so that it naturaly chooses and loads XP first.
2. If I choose to try to restore XP as the primary loader, do i run fdisk/mbr from the C prompt in windows?
3. If I choose to try to restore XP as the primary loader, what path do I give it in the boot.ini to display linux as the second choice operating system, i.e. disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(?)\.......... (path goes here (something like this))

thanks to all that might have to "belt their head against a brick wall" to solve this oproblem/s, and my condolences to those that have already done it!.

Cheers Andrew


Once you've climbed the mountain you wanted to, 
theres always another bigger one you want to climb!.


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## codejockey (Feb 11, 2002)

You should probably post your question in the Linux forum; dual-boot issues (including Grub configuration and restoring MBR) come up frequently. The archives also contain a number of helpful threads.

Some quick responses:

(1) here's some info on changing the default O/S to boot: http://forums.techguy.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=157805

(2) fdisk /MBR will re-write your MBR; note that this will remove grub, and unless you have made a boot floppy, you will not be able to boot Linux. I believe you can also use the fixmbr command from the recovery console to do the same thing.

(3) your path to Linux depends on the partitioning of the disk that contains Linux. You'll need more than just a partition reference, however; you'll also need to install a bootloader in the partition. http://jaeger.morpheus.net/linux/ntldr.php has a good disucssion of the issues and procedures involved in using ntldr to dual-boot .

Hope this helps.


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