On Tue, 2004-03-23 at 04:03, Nigel Wade wrote:
Marc Schwartz wrote:
Understand that my own use of this particular approach is that I do not want to overwrite the MBR. I need to essentially preserve the Windows partition in as transparent a process as possible, since I lease my HW and need to send it back to Dell when the lease expires.
But your approach is actually modifying the Windows partition, whereas using GRUB in the MBR doesn't touch Windows at all. To get Windows to boot Linux you first have to copy a GRUB boot sector to the Windows partition, then you have to modify boot.ini to add an option to boot Linux. To set the system back to its initial state you have to undo both of those actions. If you use GRUB in the MBR all you have to do is run fdisk/mbr.
Nigel,
Compared to actually resizing the Windows NTFS partition on the drive to make room for FC1, the copying of one file (linux.bin) and the editing of another (boot.ini) are trivial. :-)
To reset the system back to its original state, I need to do more than just delete the linux.bin file and undo the edits to boot.ini. I need to remove FC1, do all of the wiping that Tom Mitchell and I have discussed both on and off the list late last night (this morning? ;-) and then resize the NTFS partition back to it's original state.
If I copied GRUB to the MBR, I would still need to do all of the above, except the two file changes, which again, are trivial compared to the others.
The primary goal is to retain the Windows XP and Windows application installations intact, so that I do not have to reinstall the above at a later date. I have more than enough disk space to preserve those installations and still have lots of room for FC1. My approach accomplishes this.
As with most things, there is more than one way to get to the same end point. This is the mechanism that I have chosen.
Cheers,
Marc
The only point I was trying to make was that, all other things being equal, fdisk/mbr is a much simpler step than deleting linux.bin and editing boot.ini.
Ultimately the choice is yours, my main emphasis was to encourage others to follow the GRUB rather than the Windows way.
-- Nigel Wade
