Dual boot

John Welch jrw3319 at gmail.com
Sat Oct 9 13:58:05 EDT 2010


On Sat, Oct 9, 2010 at 9:02 AM, Jeffry Smith <jsmith at alum.mit.edu> wrote:
> On Sat, Oct 9, 2010 at 5:13 PM, David Rose <DRose at proviss.com> wrote:
>>  John, does "fdisk -l /dev/sdb" wipeout the OS?  I don't seem to have
>> anything on my XP drive anymore.
>>
>>
> That should just list (-l) the partitions on /dev/sdb.   Another
> option is to use cfdisk (cfdisk /dev/sdb), which will startup the
> program and show you the partition table, to include the format type
> of the partion.
>
> http://netadmintools.com/html/8cfdisk.man.html
>
> hth
> jeff
>

Running 'fdisk -l' absolutely would not have wiped out any info.  As
Jeff indicated, this simply lists the partitions on the disk.

If I were starting fresh on this here's what I would do...

Start off by (re)installing Windows XP on the first disk.  Then
install CentOS on the second disk.  During the installation process be
careful when it shows / prompts for what disks to use.  You want to
exclude the first disk.  Also, during the CentOS installation there
should be a section where it will setup grub.  Hopefully it will see
that you have a Windows XP installation and automatically configure
grub for the dual boot.  The only thing I'm not really sure of is I
tend to think of CentOS as a standalone server OS, and that's all I've
ever really used it for, so I'm not 100% sure of how well it handles
dual boot setup.  I know for sure that other Linux OS's that are more
typical for desktop use, like Fedora and Ubuntu, are very good at
finding other installations / OS's and setting grub up properly.

Good luck!

John



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