The penguin's revenge on Windows 2000

[Cymbeline]

My dad asked me to build a computer for him, and he wanted Windows 2000 and Red Hat Linux 6.2. Installing both on the computer were both nightmares, especially with Red Hat's piece of junk installer.

I first installed Windows 2000. My dad wanted two versions of Windows 2000: an English version and a Chinese version. I set up the partitions like this:

30.6 GB hard drive:

/dev/hda1 - NTFS - Windows 2000 Chinese version - 2GB.
/dev/hda2 - Extended partition - Remaining hard disk space minus 8MB.
/dev/hda3 - ext2 - /boot - 8MB.

In the extended partition, I have:
/dev/hda5 - NTFS - Windows 2000 English version. - 10GB.
/dev/hda6 - ext2 - / - 5GB.
/dev/hda7 - ext2 - /home - 12GB.
/dev/hda8 - swap partition - 300 MB.

I always first install both Windows 2000 versions. When I install Red Hat Linux, though, the English version will not boot from the Windows 2000 loader with a complaint that the ntoskrnl was corrupted or not found. The Chinese version will boot just fine.

If I delete the Linux partitions, the English version boots just fine.

I already checked the HOWTOs on this subject, and I'm still getting nowhere.

Any suggestions?

Cymbeline

[Statica]

Hi Cymb..

I cant give a definitive answer, but consider this a guess; Have you tried making multiple extended partitions? Like dual booting chinese and eng. versions of win2k, while leaving the linux FS unpartitioned and unformated.

Also would help if you told us abt the order u went installing.

And .. oh yeah if u did get it to work, I'd be interested in learning from u!

[Cymbeline]

I just got it to work, thanks to some advice from my dad (who specializes in using NT stuff).

This is what I did:

1. SInce I will be using LILO, my boot partition must reside in a primary partition. For my particular configuration, I had to upgrade to LILO version 21.5.

2. This is how I partitioned my drives:

/dev/hda1 - Windows 2000 Chinese version - 2GB
/dev/hda2 - Windows 2000 English version - 10GB
/dev/hda3 - Linux - 17GB
/dev/hda4 - Linux swap partition - 300MB

Note that you cannot use Partition Magic or NT's Disk Administrator to do this. They will toss all but the first partition to an extended partition. This was why installing Linux trashed the English version. Use Linux's fdisk for partitioning.

I installed both versions of Windows 2000, then Linux. LILO installed into the MBR can be used to boot to the NT loader, then to either version of Windows 2000.

Conceivably, I could assign the third primary partition to be the boot partition for Linux (16MB) and use the fourth primary partition as an extended partition, and split that up to install Linux. I'm not going to try that yet.

Cymbeline