Dual booting windows and linux

[techAdmin]

There's a good article on dual booting linux and windows while preserving the ntloader boot loader for windows. In other words, grub [or lilo] is installed on the linux partition, and the windows boot loader is left intact. This is useful information for some circumstances, since windows updates and upgrades tend to overwrite the boot loader too.

Read the full article here.

:: Quote ::

The advantages of this setup are:

* The Windows configuration remains essentially untouched.
* No changes to the Windows hard drive boot sector are necessary.
* Removing Linux from the machine is simple: physically remove the Linux disk and remove the Linux entry from boot.ini under Windows.
* Windows users have a tendency to reinstall the OS from time to time. If that occurs on this system, the Linux disk would be untouched (although you might not be able to boot to it until you copy the boot sector again and fix boot.ini).

While this configuration isn't ideal for everyone, it is a great way to add Linux to an Windows machine with minimal disruption of an existing Windows installation.

There's some useful links to Window's utilities [bootpart] to help do this process too. I've tried this and run into difficulties at some points, but it's possible I did something wrong. This basic method, however, is the only way to boot linux using the native windows boot loader, so if you need to do that, this is how you do it.