One other thing, since I haven't seen it covered, BACK UP EVERYTHING,
especially any contact information/bookmarks/etc... I've had enough XP
"upgrades" cause a loss of something I wanted, that it's become second
nature. Even if the backup takes a dozen CD's or DVD's, it's worth it to
be sure you won't loose some critical license or setting value you
cannot replace. If you have any DRM-protected media, make sure you
perform a license backup separately, since those licenses won't
transfer, and cannot be recovered any other way.

==Joseph++

Eric "Shubes" wrote:

> 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).

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