HOWTO: Dual boot XP & BT (With LILO)

[Kayrin]

HI all,

what about a swap partition? or does the BT installer take care of all of that?

[CurioCT]

HI all,

what about a swap partition? or does the BT installer take care of all of that?

http://www.remote-exploit.org/index....Q#Installation

[thejipster]

I must have goofed something up really badly and need some help. I tried following the instructions on this sticky thread and when I ran lilo -v, I get this error message when it gets to the part of the config where I try to refer to the hda1 partition where my windows is installed. Did I goof something up to mess up my boot sector. Can I recover and access my windows partition again?

Let me also add that I used to have this system setup to dual boot the Auditor from /dev/hda2 (I think it also used Lilo or Grub). Did I totally hose it up when I installed Backtrack over /dev/hda2? Please help!

QParted shows /dev/hda1 as "unknown" type Status Active.


Liloconfig looks like this

---------------
boot = /dev/hda
prompt
timeout = 20
bitmap=/boot/splash.bmp
change-rules
reset
vga = 0x317
image = /boot/vmlinuz
root = current
label = backtrack
read-write

other=/dev/hda1
label="Mswindows"

- Jimmy

[bmysmy]

I'm kind of new here but have successfully installed back|track.
Does it work if you take the quote symbols off of;

label="Mswindows"

and change it to;

label = Mswindows

[markds]

I'm kind of new here but have successfully installed back|track.
Does it work if you take the quote symbols off of;

label="Mswindows"

and change it to;

label = Mswindows

It should work, but I'd advise to keep it on. Some time back, lilo allowed spaces in the words if you put the whole thing in quotes - like "MS Windows". But apparently now you can't have spaces.

[espolio]

G'Day,

Thanks for the very useful post.
I am new to linux (read two days ago) and found it easy to follow.

One question so far.
How can I change the default LILO boot option time to about 10 seconds?

I dont want to wait 2 minutes to begin loading windows without manually hitting enter.

Thanks in advance,

espolio

[Toolio]

Excellent stuff,

Very concise and informative, got it working after 2 gos. Just thought id mention a few things in relation to my installation...

I had left about 10 Gigs on my laptop leftover for backtrack but I couldnt find a working evaluation of partition magic.

Heres how I setup my partition using fdisk on my single 60GB disk.

1. Boot from backtrack
2. login
3. run fdisk on /dev/hda (Your primary hard disk)
4. set up another partition called hda2 (hda1 is your xp partition)
5. write the partition details
6. this partition must be formated for linux so run mke2fs /dev/hda2
7. Reboot backtrack
8. This partition should now be visible to backtrack
9. Run the backrack installer
10. Write backtrack files to /dev/hda2
11. Write LILO to /dev/hda
12. Follow the rest of killnines tutorial

I'm sorry if this might be very obvious to most of you but it might spare some people a lot of hassle !

This looks pretty cool, but for the sake of all the n00bs out there, could someone please clear up some of the definitions? For example, "Write LILO to /dev/hda" - ok, great, but how? This is exactly the kind of core information I want to clarify and expound upon in a total n00bs guide I'm working on. ANY help is VERY appreciated!

BTW this is an awesome thread, with a lot of different scenarios - belated thanks to all who took the time to share their experiences or expertise.
Peace

[Paton]

You type

lilo

It then says you've added whatever was added in the Lilo config.

[imported_itsme]

Is it also possible to install XP on a laptop where BT is already installed? I have BT installed on my laptop en it works great. But i also want to install Xp on it, next to my BT installation.

Thanks in advance

[markds]

Yes you can, but you need to have the B|T CD handy.

Follow these steps (Step 1 and 2 are only incase you have not already partitioned your hdd) :

1) Boot up your BT hdd install and open a shell and do qtparted which is the linux disk partitioning tool.

2) Partition your hard drive to make space for the WinXP installation. This new partition must be primary partition and can be after your B|T partition. Take note of what B|T assigns to your new partition (eg: /dev/hda2)

3) Create the partition and exit qtparted and reboot the machine with the WinXP installation CD.

4) Install the WinXP to the new partition you created with qtparted.

5) When you reboot after installing XP, you'll notice it will boot up straight to WinXP, because the boot info has been re-written by XP.

6) Reboot your machine with the B|T cd

7) At the boot: prompt type :

/boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/hda1

assuming that your hdd installation of B|T is on hda1. This will load your hdd install of B|T using the CD to call your hdd data.

8) Log in and type nano /etc/lilo.conf and add the following lines before the line read-write :

other = /dev/hda2
label = WinXP

assuming that /dev/hda2 is what B|T assigned to your WinXP partition when you were creating the partition with qtmagic in step 2.

9) Press CTRL-X and answer Y to save the changes

10) Execute /sbin/lilo to reread the boot config and write the changes to the boot sector.

11) Reboot

You should get the B|T boot up with 2 choices in the top left corner, one for Backtrack and one for Windows. Use the arrow keys to toggle between them and hit enter to choose.

Is it also possible to install XP on a laptop where BT is already installed? I have BT installed on my laptop en it works great. But i also want to install Xp on it, next to my BT installation.

Thanks in advance