red hat dual booting with xp

[akmsr]

hi all,
i was reading and going to different forums about linux for couple of months. got interested and decided to try myself. got red hat 7.2 from a friend, downloaded the manuals and guides from redhat.com went through installation guide etc.
last night installed it dual booting with xp (same disc but different partition) and following the guide mounted the bootloader grub in mbr. bam! after rebooting no more windows only linux. so used xp's disk to fix the mbr. now i can only log on to xp, for linux have to use the boot disk. so reinstalled red hat again, this time mounted on boot sector not mbr. but still have to use the boot disk to log on to linux.
now is there a way for me to do dual boot without the boot disk? just remember that i saw linux for the first time last night so don't yell at me like they do somewhere else to newbies :(
another thing, why in the guide it said to mbr if it messes it up?
thanx all
akmsr

[freezinbutt]

When you installed Grub in the MBR, did you see Windows in the list? Usually there are several choices to make and you are only given about 5 seconds to choose. I use LILO with Mandrake 8.2 and LILO gives you a list to choose from but Windows is way at the bottom. You've got to read fast to get it.

This might also help:
http://www.littlewhitedog.com/reviews_other_00011.asp

This is about dual booting W2K and Linux. If you read the article afterthoughts (at the end of the article) you might get some insight into Grub and XP.

Good luck,
freezinbutt

[akmsr]

no just redhat, only one item.

[abrakadabra]

Hi akmsr,
Few things I'd check first. I have Win2000 with Suse. I know you have different OS. I'd make sure that XP supports dual boot. Also, I'd try installing LILO and see if that works. Using LILO when you start your machine you'll probably see just the LILO prompt, at this point hit the TAB key to see your boot options and type it right at the LILO prompt. What I'm saying on XP supporting dual boot, is that maybe XP takes over the MBR all for itself. You know how Windows can be very selfish.
Good luck!

[akmsr]

thanx all, i figured it out. thanx freezinbutt, the link was helpful. i used xp bootloader. installed grub in linux boot sector, made a linux.bin floppy, copied it to xp root c:\, modified boot.ini and it worked. now comes the modem lol. i'm gonna post a new thread. thanx again

[freezinbutt]

I thought that article might help. It sure helped me. I wanted to use windows bootloader on my wifes machine instead of lilo. I really wanted to do it just to say, "I did that."

A couple more great sites for Linux info is www.linuxnewbie.org and www.linuxquestions.org. At linuxnewbie.org, pay attention to the NHF's (newbie help files). Great stuff!!!

Best of luck,
freezinbutt

[akmsr]

ok, i'll do that thanx
akmsr