Installation to dedicated disk

[Peter Garrett]

On Mon, 01 May 2006 16:12:14 -0700
garys at opusnet.com (Gary W. Swearingen) wrote:

> Alan McKinnon <alan at linuxholdings.co.za> writes:
> 
> > On Monday 01 May 2006 05:58, Chanchao wrote:
> >> Then when installing Dapper: It will overwrite your windows boot
> >> menu. But that's okay, boot from your windows install CD, go to the
> >> 'repeair' option where you get a console prompt and let 'fixmbr'
> >> and 'fixboot' do their stuff.
> >
> > No no no that's completely wrong. It leaves no way to boot Linux. Why 
> > install Linux only to then make it unbootable?
> 
> So one can later configure one's preferred boot loader to boot Linux.
> I hope we can still tolerate user choice in such matters.  Even bad ones.

I think Alan ( quite rightly in my view) was trying to help the OP to
avoid accidentally resetting the MBR and then not being sure how to
proceed. Unfortunately, following Chanchao's advice would leave most
people in the position of having an unbootable Linux partition and not
knowing how to fix that problem. Since this list is read by many people, I
think it was necessary to explain that.

[snip]
> 
>    I want to ensure that Lilo, or Grub for that matter, installs only
>    to the second, ubuntu disk and leaves my Windows boot sector alone:
>    I will use the Windows XP Boot Loader to get to ubuntu.
> 
> It good of people to provide alternative suggestions, etc, but it
> would be even better to answer the questions that are asked first,
> or at least acknowledge the asked question instead of ignoring it.

Which is why in my earlier post I said:

<quote> A google on " dual boot windows linux ntloader howto " turned up

http://wiki.linuxquestions.org/wiki/Dual_booting

amongst others...

Why anyone would bother with this kind of convoluted approach, I really
don't know, since grub on the MBR works just fine, but whatever...

</quote>

So, if the OP really wants to do it with the Windows bootloader, yes it's
possible, and I tried to point out how the information could be found. On
the other hand, this is a Linux list, not a Windows list, so I think on
the whole it's reasonable to emphasise the Linux solution, which also has
the virtue of simplicity.

There's also the question of whether many list members actually have an
answer - I know that in my case I have never felt the need to use the
ntloader for dual booting, so the best I can do is to point in the
(presumably) right direction.

> 
> The OP then asked:
> 
>    Is it possible for me to be assured that this is possible, and that
>    the Dapper Drake installation routine will be sufficiently explicit
>    so as to militate against accidents?
> 
> Which I interpreted to mean: Will the installer always allow me to
> skip the first-disk-MBR overwritting operation (or put it on a
> different disk) or does it try to be "user friendly" and do the MBR
> automatically.  I didn't (and still don't) know what to tell him.
> 
> (Not that the OP is still paying attention to this thread.)

I don't remember if this is an option in the installer either. I assume it
is there somewhere - perhaps if you select " expert", (which has other
complications, like the fact that it sets a root password and thus
requires reconfiguration of /etc/sudoers after install), but I don't know.
Perhaps someone else can clarify this for the OP.

Peter

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