dual booting xp and redhat 7.3

[isuace]

I am trying to dual boot my Inspiron 8100 between xp and redhat 7.3. I created a 5 gig partition for xp and installed it, no problems.

Then I installed rh from the cds that came with "Red Hat Linux Bible", I created a "/" partition 3 gigs in size a swap partition of 1030 megs, and an extended partition of 4 gigs.

I installed from the cds and selected to place the GRUB boot loader in the first sector of the boot partition. When the computer boots up there are no choices to select rh as an operating system. I know how to edit the boot.ini files in windows but I dont know what to put in it.

How can I get my computer to give me the option of which OS to load?

Thanks in advance for any help, this is my first time with Linux.

[Astrotolus]

I am not totally sure about this, since I just set up a dual boot with XP and RH8, and tis might confuse you more but this is what I can remember.

First off all, I set up the partitions, one NTFS and one FAT32 for XP and one empty for RH. After installing XP I put the RH cd in and choose to let RH automatically partition the drive, and then pointed it to the emtpy space.

I think I set it to grub was installed on the mbr, but I know I left it at the default whatever it was, so choose that. After that it wsa smooth sailing.

Maybe that helps?

astro

[jglen490]

I installed from the cds and selected to place the GRUB boot loader in the first sector of the boot partition. The better solution would have been to install the Grub boot code to the MBR, but all is not lost!!

If you can get to your Linux space you can copy your Linux boot sector to a data file (i.e., linux.bin), then copy that file to your C: drive ("C:\linux.bin"). You will then need to go into your boot.ini file and add a line for Linux.
=================================
To copy the boot sector:

dd if=/dev/hda2 of=/linux.bin bs=512 count=1

Then copy linux.bin to a floppy
=================================
To modify the boot.ini file:

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT="Windows NT Workstation ...
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT="Windows NT Workstation ...
C:\linux.bin="Linux"