Annoying question: Installing W2K or WXP on a Linux-only box

[Benjamin Scott]

On Aug 9 at 8:51pm, Fred wrote:
> Created partitions on the new slave drive, but when I went to install, it 
> insisted that I reformat one of the Linux partitions to a "Windows 
> recognizable partition" just so it could install its boot loader.

   Yah. Doze doesn't understand EXT2/3, so it can't install a boot loader on 
them.  Which is reasonable.

> Arrgh. Would not give me the option of just skipping the boot loader install 
> process, and indeed did not even refer to it as such.

   Yah.  It never occurred to Microsoft that there might be situations where 
you want their boot loader ("NTLDR") on the target partition, even though the 
installer doesn't know how you could boot it.  Which is not so reasonable.

   You can trick doze into installing if you temporarily attach the target 
drive for the install as the first hard disk in the system.  Create a primary 
partition for doze and its loader, and install to that.  Do not create any 
other partitions at this time.  If you can, avoid letting doze even *see* 
any other partitions at this time.

   Once you have a working doze install, switch the drives back and 
configure whatever external boot mechanism you have (e.g., GRUB).  You should 
be able to chain to the NTLDR on the doze disk.  Doze will identify the 
partition by signature and mount it as "C:", making things work.

   If doze sees any other partitions at this point, they will be in the 
order they will be staying in, which is good.  (You can usually fix any 
problems, but why complicate matters?)

   This only works for NT (including 2000 and XP).  NT can intelligently assign 
mounts, if you ask nicely and say the proper code words.  Not so for anything 
based on MS-DOS (95/98/ME), which use an obscure algorithmic approach which 
cannot be changed.  Those OSes (I use the term loosely) will get really 
confused if the OS isn't on the active partition of the first hard disk.

> Perhaps the latter is the best approach? Has anyone shifted HDs around 
> before and hand-edited the fstab file to make everything behave again? Or is 
> there more to it than that?

   You can generally do this fairly easily, as nix is pretty good about keeping 
partitions and disks and drives (oh my) abstracted away via the unified 
filesystem tree.  Most times, the only thing you have to edit is the 
/etc/fstab.  That said, you often have to boot a rescue disk do so, and it's 
a hassle, so I recommend avoiding it if you can.

   Doze is always a hassle, so you don't loose anything extra with the drive 
swap described above.

> I'm not worried about the boot loader issue on the new Windows drive -- I 
> can always reinstall it and configure the grub.conf file if I have to.

   Problems can arise because Microsoft's "boot menu" and OS-specific boot 
functions are all combined into one thing.  Of course, you can say the same 
about Linux, but the Linux bootstrap process is a *lot* simpler then doze. 
At most, you're talking two files (kernel and initial ramdisk) with Linux. 
With doze, the boot loader has to read several files, and I think it might 
even open one of the registry hives read-only.  Blech.  Anyhows, it's best to 
leave Microsoft alone in it's happy little world.  Let them have a partition 
for this OS, let them install their loader to the same filesystem, and control 
things from outside.

   Hope this helps,

-- 
Ben <dragonhawk at iname.com>