Using Ntloader To Boot Linux Win2K or XP, should work with most Linux

Basically what we're going to do with NTLoader is use NTLoader to boot into Linux's bootloader which then boots Linux, why someone would do that when Grub works perfectly fine booting Windows on NTFS? Who knows what reason other than it could destroy their MBR and make both OS inaccessible or at least render Linux useless till it's recovered, NTLoader is not specifically designed to boot other Operating Systems other than Windows.

We will be using 2 Hard Drives, this is not necessary, we could use 2 partitions on a hard drive, but we should have the Operating Systems seperated, to make it easier on ourselves.

The hard drives are configured on the primary IDE controller (could use SATA, SCSI, etc but for this it's IDE), one hard drive setup as Master (C:) where Windows XP will be installed and the Other drive setup as Slave (D:).

First install Windows XP to the first hard drive, this should be easy enough and not require instructions on how to do this. Next install your choice of Linux, for this I am using Fedora Core 3 and using the GUI installer, this is simple enough too. There will be an option that gets you to configure your bootloader, default installation uses Grub, we need to configure it more and there's a checkbox at the bottom of the screen that allows us to do advanced configurations on it, check it then click next, we should be at the advanced configuration screen and there's two choices for booting using the MBR or installing it on our 2nd Hard Drive /dev/hdb we want to install it on our 2nd hard drive so choose the second option. Now just continue with the installation.

Fedora Core 3 has 4 installation CDs and 1 Rescue CD or we can replace the installation CDs with 1 DVD, You will need a rescue disk of some sort, or at least a program that can boot you into your OS from floppy or CD or other means, Red Hat/Fedora use to create Floppy disks for this type of installation but it seems to be non-existant in my quick install of it, so I needed an alternative method. Knoppix Live CD is also quite handy for this and should be kept as a Linux Recovery Tool.

After installation, I rebooted with the Rescue CD in, I press Enter to enter Rescue mode and had my root of my linux partition found and given a bash prompt, I then chroot'ed to this part of the drive.

I then placed a formatted blank floppy in the drive and mounted it.

mount -t msdos /dev/fd0 /media/floppy

next I found out which drive contained the boot information, there should exist two, one for Windows and one for Linux.

fdisk -l

(this is a lowercase "L")

This should display a table of the partitions and have an asterisk (*) marked where boot information exists. Since we need to know where the boot information is for the 2nd drive we know it's got to be /dev/hdb? where ? is the partition that has it. For this we will assume it's /dev/hdb1.

Next we copy the boot section to our floppy disk, make sure it's still in the drive.

dd if=/dev/hdb1 bs=512 count=1 of=/media/floppy/linux.img

If all goes well we should have linux.img residing in our floppy disk

ls /media/floppy/*

Now 'exit' till it reboots, remove the rescue CD and floppy disk. Boot into Windows and put the floppy disk back in, copy linux.img from A: over to C:\

Right-Click My Computer, go to Properties and click on the Advanced Tab, Next click on Startup and Recovery's Setting, where we will can edit our boot.ini file, so click on edit to edit our boot.ini. We now add underneath the [operating systems] tag, and the last entry to the file

C:\linux.img="Choose the name you want to display here"

Save the file and close, now back at this screen we can choose the default OS to boot, I've left it as Windows, I also lowered the time for waiting to around 8 seconds.

Remove the floppy disk and reboot the system, we are now presented with NTLoader with the option of booting Windows or Choose the name you want to display here, So we select out Linux boot, it will now boot into Grub, what's the point in using 2 bootloaders? I'll leave that up to you, so now once in Linux, we go through the final configuration, setup etc.

In your distribution, you should know how to get to your bootloader configuration via terminal or GUI, I would use terminal but my favourite console based editor is not available until I install it so I'll use the bootloader GUI found in system settings, there I set the timeout to 1 second so I am not shown the Grub bootloader, configure this how you like, you may have multiple kernels you would prefer to run, so you may like to use Grub bootloader as well as NTLoader.

And that's all folks, comments and suggestions are all welcomed.

Cheers,

MC

hey mci'v got a situation with my laptop:i got linux installed on one partition & windows xp installed on the other. not that long ago, i decided to install xp from scratch and slipstream sp2.alas, bye bye boot menu, as was to be expected off course.problem is: i don't have a linux bootdisk and even if i had, i don't have a floppy drive in my laptop, so it'd be useless.any idea how i'd get my boot menu back or just get into linux? tnx in advance

hey mc

 

i'v got a situation with my laptop:

i got linux installed on one partition & windows xp installed on the other. not that long ago, i decided to install xp from scratch and slipstream sp2.

alas, bye bye boot menu, as was to be expected off course.

 

problem is: i don't have a linux bootdisk and even if i had, i don't have a floppy drive in my laptop, so it'd be useless.

 

any idea how i'd get my boot menu back or just get into linux?

 

tnx in advance

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

What distribution are you running, and what bootloader did you install?

tomsrtbt http://www.toms.net/rb/ can be used as a rescue disk, made for floppy though it's quite possible to build a bootable CD from it. You could also just use Knoppix Live CD or any of the Live CDs.

You could even try booting your first disk that you installed linux from and type linux rescue to enter rescue mode. Then you would do most these steps listed below, remember if you are using lilo you have to update it each change as well as update each image you use in NTLoader to boot from else it will appear as if no changes were made, grub does not suffer from this.

Failing that, you could install an 3rd party bootloader that can detect Linux. The problem I could see is that the boot sector was not installed on a partition of Linux but rather straight to the MBR, 3rd party software might be the way to go.

Cheers,

MC

copy pasted your answer, gonna try when i get homeas far as i remember, i did install my bootloader in the mbri use lilo + mandrakei have a knoppix cd at home, will check it out.tnx!