Boot/partitioning hell ?!

Vincent Trouilliez vincent.trouilliez at modulonet.fr
Sun May 8 23:55:32 UTC 2005


Okay, the other day I successfully tried, on a spare box, RAID0. This
showed that I indeed really needed a separate /boot partition.
Now I want to switch to RAID0 on my main machine, but problem is that I
have an extra thing to worry about : Windows XP. 
Does XP require to be installed on the very first partition of a disk,
or will it manage to boot if there is a small ext3 /boot partition
before its own FAT32 partition ?
I have always heard that windows always had to be installed
"first" (chronologically), but I can't remember if that also meant first
"geographically" so to speak.
I have a slight hope that Win XP can install on whatever partition, as
ISTR that last time I installed it, it asked what partition to use.
If this fails, and I do have to use the first partition for XP, is it
possible for GRUB to boot from the a disk's MBR but use a /boot
partition on another disk ?


More visually, question is: can I do :

/dev/hda: [MBR/GRUB] [/boot] [Win XP] [md0 (/) ] [md1 (/home) ]
/dev/hdc: [  Free        space      ] [md0 (/) ] [md1 (/home) ]

or will I have to do this instead (assuming GRUB is happy with that) :

/dev/hda: [MBR/GRUB] [Win XP  ] [md0 (/) ] [md1 (/home) ]
/dev/hdc: [/boot] [Free space ] [md0 (/) ] [md1 (/home) ]


Regards,

--
Vince





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