Craig White wrote:

> On Thu, 2005-04-21 at 05:34 -0700, Joe Huber wrote:
> 
>>I'm going to tread into sort of forbidden territory here...
>>
>>I've got a dual boot machine - Debian and Windows 2000. I find myself having
>>to upgrade (or I guess down grade depending on how you look at it) 2000 to
>>XP. Has anyone ventured down a path similar to this in the past? I've got a
>>LAMP setup on the Debian side (trying to learn some web stuff) and well...
>>I'm afraid that something bad could happen to the Debian side when I put the
>>CD in. It took me the better part of a week a couple months ago to get the
>>PHP build (some hang up with a library related to using PDFs) and I wouldn't
>>want to have to go rebuild the Debian.
>>
> 
> ----
> prior to installing WinXP...
> 
> 1. print out a partition map so you know which stuff is in which
> partition.
> 
> df -h
> 
> fdisk /dev/hda -l
> 
> 2. make sure that you have a working boot disk, can boot it and can
> chroot to your Linux installation...if using a 2.4 kernel, you should be
> able to make a floppy boot disk with mkbootdisk command. If using a 2.6
> kernel, you will probably need a boot cd and have to chroot to your
> current set up in order to fix the boot loader.
> 
> 3. Know which boot loader you are using (grub or lilo) and learn how to
> 'reassert' it (grub-install /dev/hda - lilo -v)
> 
> Then after you install WinXP, it will have over-written boot blocks, you
> can get it back - (the dual boot)
> 
> Craig
> 

What Craig said. ;)

The "Linux Cookbook" book (O'Reilly) covers this (and many other things) 
very well. I highly recommend it.

Accordingly, you can install XP in the same partition that 2K resided in 
(XP installer lets you select/create partitions fairly nicely). After XP 
is installed, boot to linux using a recovery or live disk (knoppix works 
well).

If you're using grub, run grub from the command line as root:
# grub
grub> root (hd0,0)
grub> setup (hd0)
grub> quit
# exit

I'm not sure about lilo.

Alternatively, you could back up your MBR before installing XP, then 
restore it when XP is installed. To back it up, mount a floppy then use 
the dd command:
# dd if=/dev/hda of=/floppy/mbr bs=512 count=1
To restore it after installing XP:
# dd if=/floppy/mbr of=/dev/hda bs=512 count=1
You can name the mbr file on the floppy anything you like.

Oh, and be sure to substitute the appropriate drive and parition 
designations for your system.

Fear not. I've recently installed XP (not my choice) on several boxen 
along side of pre-existing linux installations, and it's no big deal. 
The only odd thing was that when there were no partitions that XP 
recognized (i.e. linux), it would assign drive letters to the "foreign" 
partitions first, then end up assigning XP to drive G: or some such 
(instead of C:). Since you're upgrading 2K to XP, I don't think that 
this will occur. In case it does, you can simply re-install XP to get it 
installed on C: (there might be an easier way, I don't know if it even 
really matters).
-- 
-Eric 'shubes'
"There is no such thing as the People;
  it is a collectivist myth.
  There are only individual citizens
  with individual wills
  and individual purposes."
-William E. Simon (1927-2000),
     Secretary of the Treasury (1974-1977)
  "A Time For Truth" (1978), pg. 237

 
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