Planning dual boot, partition issues

S

spookykid

Gawd
Joined
Jul 27, 2000
Messages
649
Hi all -

I've spent the last 4 days reading everything I can get my hands on regarding dual-booting with XP and Linux. I've decided to try out Mandrake 10. The last time I touched Linux was about 5 years ago, and last week I was on a business trip using a Debian box exclusively, and it re-ignited my desire to make the switch away from the dark side. :) (If only I could either get Macromedia Dreamweaver MX working under Linux, or find a suitable alternative, I'd have no need for Windows at all!)

Anyway... my questions.

My XP install is a bit - shall we say - jacked up. I had a big crash a couple months back, and was able to recover, but my partitions just seem "wrong." (I didn't care - it worked, and I only lost one drive of data as opposed to losing everything, so I ran with it). Right now, I have one hard disk. It's got 60gb devoted to WinXP, and 20gb used for data now, which I've cleared off hoping to put Mandrake on. I'm using NTFS on both partitions currently.

The oddity is, Windows sees the partitions as C: and E: with C being marked as the boot partition (contains the windows directory), and E marked as the system partition. The E drive contains a copy of boot.ini and ntldr - that's the odd part - and my boot.ini file points to drive 0 partition 2 to boot up. The C drive must be being recognized as partition 2, because it's the only one with Windows on it. C is marked as a logical drive, and E is marked as the primary partition. I don't know why the C drive isn't marked as both the boot and system partition, and I'd like it to be - so if anyone knows how to change that, let me know! I think that would fix one of my concerns (read on....)

I booted Knoppix 3.4 off the CD and saw that my 2 Windows partitions were showing up as hda2 (the Windows C drive) and hda5 (the Windows E drive).

Huh??? (Why 2 and 5?)

In this machine, I also have 2 cd drives (a burner and a DVD). No other IDE devices.

Since my partitions are already goofy as it is, I fear that attempting to install Mandrake will hose my XP install. At first I was going to clear the E drive and delete the partition to make free space for Mandrake, but after investigating my current setup, it looks like that in itself will render my Windows install useless (since E is the system partition and therefore needs boot.ini there for Windows). Here's where I wish I could change C to be both the system and boot partition. Even so, I still fear that the way these partitions are being detected, Mandrake would kill my Windows install.

I read all about the problem with XP partitions and the bug with Mandrake 10, but it seemed to not affect systems that didn't require a resizing of the Windows partition (which I won't need to do, if I wipe that E partition and create empty space prior to the linux install).

Any advice is appreciated. I'm finding plenty of helpful posts and tutorials, but none with advice that is quite applicable to my goofy partition situation.

Thanks in advance!
 
Wow, what a mess. My advice (and probably your best option) would be to simply backup crucial data, delete all partitions, write zeros to the drive, and then start over. If you cant format the entire drive and have to keep your XP installation, I would suggest using something like Partition Magic to move and resize your partitions properly. You could also mess around with the Disk Management to see if something got mapped wrong somewhere along the line (Administrative Tools -> Computer Management -> Storage -> Disk Management). It all sounds like a real mess though!

On another note, when I switched to linux I was missing the same software you are... MM Studio. You cant replace it in linux and I havnt tried running it in wine (probably produce lousy performance if it works at all), but there are some good alternatives. It all depends upon what you are doing with the software, but look into Bluefish, Quanta, kDevelop, and The GIMP. Those are the tools I find myself using most in place of what I did with MM Studio.
 
Another tidbit of oddity.... both of my partitions show as NTFS in XP (as well as in Knoppix when run off the CD).

But in fdisk, my smaller partition shows as NTFS, and my larger partition (where the windows OS files reside) shows as EXT DOS. (Should it show as NTFS?)

I tried copying my ntldr, ntdetect, and boot.ini files to the root of my larger partition and marked it active in fdisk, but that led to a hang on boot - not even an error message - prior to the splash screen.

Arg....

Thanks for the alternative web progs, Tweakin - I've tried Bluefish briefly and liked it, and am intrigued by Quanta. I plan to try it out as soon as I get up and running. I primarily need a replacement for Dreamweaver (even though I used a text editor for ages before DW - some of its synchronization and site management features are kinda nice, and I like its template system).
 
Hi all -

Just thought I'd update ya's on what happened.

I bought Partition Magic and a new 250gig hard drive. (Best Buy has 'em on sale for $159 - holy cow!! Only 1 year warranty - it's a Maxtor - but 7200 rpm, ATA133, 8mb cache, so I'l loving it :) Comes with a pci ATA133 card if your mainboard doesn't already support it).

Anyway... so I decided to merge my 2 partitions on my main drive, then install the new hd, then load linux onto the new drive.

I ran partition magic with the following operations requested: make the C partition a primary one, mark it active, and merge E into C.

That went fine - no problems, but upon reboot, I got the error: "A disk read error has occurred. Press CTRL+ALT+DEL to restart."

Well that sucks! After much research (thank god I have a backup computer online), I discovered a tiny little bug in Windows whereby if you install NTFS from the get-go in XP (which I'm guessing most people do, since it's the default), you can have this problem (caused by a million different things - including resizing partitions) of the disk read error. The solution? Convert your drive to FAT32, you'll be back in business, then convert back to NTFS if so desired. Well, Partition Magic wouldn't even boot off the CD while this disk read error was going on, so that wasn't an option for me.... yet.

I screwed around with the Recovery Console for hours, trying fixmbr, fixboot, re-configuring boot.ini, to no avail. I then tried the "repair" re-installation option in XP. It worked, up until the first reboot - then the disk read error.

Here's where I f'd up. I then decided, screw it, I'll just reload XP onto itself - it'll wipe out all my apps and settings but I'll still have my data. Same problem - upon reboot, disk read error.

What I SHOULD have done before reinstalling was this. (I found the solution one step too late). I decided to install the new hd as my primary, make the old drive my backup so I could at least grab the data off of it. I plugged everything in and accidentally had my Partition Magic cd still in the drive and.... wait a minute!! It is working!! Huh??? That disk read error was causing partition magic to blow up upon choosing the language to use, but now it was working. So I decided to convert my old drive to FAT32 and see if in fact it would become working again. (I figured, at worst, I lose it, which at this point was what I expected anyway, and at best, I'll be able to read/write to it from Linux, and maybe even get the Windows install booting).

Well, it worked - because when I shut down and plugged that old drive back in as primary, it came up into where I left off at the Windows install. Damn it! Why is that bad?? Because, if I would have tried this before the clean install - when I was in the middle of the REPAIR install - I wouldn't have lost my Windows installation. Heart is breaking now, mad at myself, oh mad, oh mad...

I got my drivers loaded in my "new" windows, loaded a couple apps over themselves (the files are all still there in Program Files, but the registry entries are missing, rendering most of them useless now).

I didn't spend too much time on that, because I figured I could still blow the whole thing up again loading Linux. So I plugged my new 250gb drive in as secondary, and popped in the Mandrake 10 cd.

Installed Mandrake - it found all of my hardware without a problem (had some configuration issues with my Linksys WUSB11 wireless USB adapter but found the solution this morning).

After spending 8 HOURS trying to fix that screwed up Windows install of mine, I am now swearing that because I'm starting from scratch anyway, I might as well start from scratch in Linux. May I never again have grief caused by bugs that have been known about for over 2 YEARS and not fixed. Oh, it just kills me, how Windows users are at the mercy of Microsoft. I guess losing entire operating system installs is not a big enough problem or inconvenience for Windows users for MS to bother fixing it. (Or maybe they CAN'T fix it - could they be that incompetent?)

At any rate, I'm typing this now from Mozilla in Mandrake 10. I just finished importing my mozilla bookmarks from my old Windows drive, and am on my way to becoming a former Windows user.

Ultimately I'd like to run Debian , but with the shaky Windows install I had, I feared the Debian installer. Once I trash Windows for good, maybe I'll take a shot at it.

Thanks all for your help and for listening to me ramble! :)
 
wow, that was like a book :)

i am not much help when it comes to helping people with these things over the internet, buti can tell you that it will be worth it once you get everything sorted out, and back working.

i run a dual boot with xp SP2 and knoppix linux on my laptop and it is GREAT, i have windows on a 20gb partition and linux on a 10gb one, and it works out very well. i think i use LILO boot chooser, but i am not positive on that one.
 
theres an app, you have to pay for, called crossOver office. This app will let you run dreamweaver MX without any problems. Also lets you run a ton of other applications, you can read about it here,
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1558,1619014,00.asp

i use it and it works great. They also provide plugins so you can view .mov, .wmv, etc in your browser on linux. Easy install as well. Thought you might like to know. As far as having i good editor i used to use dreamweaver and thought it was great but switched to eclipse. But i found the love of my life, vim :)
 
thanks - I'll check out CodeWeavers Crossover Office. Looks like they have a free trial.
 
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