Boot/partitioning hell ?!

Matthew S-H mathbymath at aol.com
Mon May 9 00:20:03 UTC 2005


On May 8, 2005, at 7:55 PM, Vincent Trouilliez wrote:
> 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 ?
/boot doesn't have to be on your first partition OR your first hard 
drive.
However, GRUB must be installed in the MBR of your first hard drive.
I'm not sure if WinXP must be installed to the first partition or not.  
But
you shouldn't need to have it anywhere else.  Just put /boot after WinXP
and you should be fine.

~Matt





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