Dual Boot Linpus and XP - Idiots' Guide

Some have suggested using the Gparted distro to alter the partition layout but, I thought, my live Puppy on a stick distro has Gparted in it and at least my Puppy distro is useful - so I'll use that instead.

I booted live Puppy and tried to mount the Linpus partition but was surprised to see the partition was identified as NTFS.

What lies must I tell my puppy so I can use its Gparted?
Peter

 

sounds like puppys a bit mad, thougha re you sure its showin your ones hd and notyour pupply pen

 

Just used this guide to install and dual boot my AAO and wanted to express thanks to the guys who came up with this - thanks it worked a treat

 

I'm glad it was helpful as I'm sure DJ_Steve does too (who is far more active on these forums than myself!).

Ironically, having had dual boot on my AAO for some time I decided the time had come to remove Linpus completely as I never used it and could do with the 20Gb it occupied on the 120Gb hard disk.

So I just wiped the disk and loaded XP from an external DVD drive and have never looked back (well, it's only been a month but you know what I mean).

I was so sure that I would be using Linpus as a stepping stone to Ubuntu and other Linux distros but when push came to shove I just didn't have the time to learn all the foibles of yet another operating system; especially one that relied so heavily on the command prompt (aka terminal).

Instead I downloaded the Windows 7 beta and, now, the RC1 build. If I was going to put anything else on my AAO this would be it. It's everything I had hoped Vista would have been (but wasn't). But Win7 is great and allegedly runs fine on netbooks like the AAO (with 1Gb RAM anyway) so I may just opt for that solution before long.

We all need a challenge, don't we?

 

yep ive got win7 rc1 on my aao at the moment and it runs perfect (1.5gb ram though) very nippy and boot times are great

 

@DJ_ Steve Somehow I just knew you would be an early adopter!

But that's great news and something I shall be very seriously considering. The RC1 doesn't even expire until June next year so it is worth doing.

Do all the XP drivers work OK on Win 7 (eg sound / webcam / wireless / LAN / SD slot etc etc) or are there some compromises to be suffered here?

Cheers!

 

actually win7 recognised just about everything itself even sd card worked i seem to remember, vista drivers work but can be temperamental and theirs not decent gfx drivers (it will run aero tho)

 

After about 40 hours straight of trying to get this to work I finally suceeded! I did things a little differently, though. To cut out some time and simplify some steps, I went ahead and installed the normal Fedora grub FIRST..before I did anything else. I also moved the linux swap file to the middle and placed the windows NTFS file on the end, thereby getting rid of the hal error. In the grub.conf file I told windows to look in (hd0,2)

I did have to re-install grub from the gparted live pen but it worked just as you said it would. In the end I want to thank you. I have been trying to do this for almost a year now and this is the only way I have ever gotten it to work. A million thanks!

Lance

PS. I just wanted to add this question. Now that I've read the entire thread, I may want to try Windows 7. Now that I have Linpus/XP dual boot working nicely do you think it will be hard to go ahead and install Windows 7 to make a triple boot? BTW, I don't have 2 computers. I just printed out your instructions on paper and followed them that way.. Anyway, is there an easy way to add Windows 7 to the mix?

 

win 7 should work in triuple boot easy enough yea

 

I followed the suggested link on page one, eventually got to the click "here" for the guide ...and it leads to page not found

Can anyone help ?

 

I have followed the guide for duel booting but when I partioned my disk I somehow managed to do it in the wrong way so the partions now read:-
/dev/sda1 ntfs
/dev/sda2 ext2 /sda2 linpus
unallocated unallocated ( I had another go at partioning and ended up with this!)
/dev/sda3 linux-swap
This is as viewed in Gparted
I now have machine that stops with the "missing hal.dll error" when I boot in XP and a blank screen when I boot in Linpus, I have tried to re-install the bootloader but because the partions are not the same it gets stuck at "grub-install /dev/sda" and gives the following error "the file /boot/grub/stage1 not read correctly"
The main problem is I really don't know what I'm doing but felt if I followed the guide "parrot" fasion I would suceed but have failed. Any suggestions would be great. Also will using Acers recovery program sort partioning if I cannot sort it any other way.

 

You can recover from this.

Your XP (NTFS) partition isthe first partition. This means your boot.ini file in the XP partition should refer to partition 0 (zero) rather than 1 (one).

Follow the guide referring to mising hal.dll and just replace the (1) to (0) and you should be able to boot to XP.

If you get stuck, you could reinstall XP, naming the required (existing)partition as the place you want XP to install in and XP will resolve the boot.ini problem for you.

DJ_Steve or another member may have other suggestions.

Finally, ask yourself whether you really want a Linpus partition at all. If not, then just blitz the partition entirely and install XP on it using an external CD drive. That's what I eventually did, after discovering that I never used the Linpus partition at all after many weeks.

Frankly, I'm keen to install the RC of Windows 7 as I have the RC1 licence until July 2010 (after which it's only £70 to buy a proper copy). If I can ever find the time...

 

Thanks for the reply ,but I have got totally confused so I run the recovery program and started from scratch . I have partitioned the disk correctly this time and started to load XP got to the "hal.dll error " I cannot get my machine to go back into Linpus it just hangs with the flashing bar. So went back into Gparted , then terminal , when i got to "mount /dev/sda1 /sda1" it came up with "mount: wrong fs type,bad option, bad sperblock on /dev/sda1,missing codepage or helper program, or other error" I know you said don't bother with Linpus and just load XP but I don't know how to do that either thats why I took the duel boot root as there were some good instructions to follow, also my partner likes the simplicity of Linpus and I like the speed at which you can get on the net from a cold start ,XP seems to take for ages.

 

Those errors you are getting are beyond my limited Linpus experience, I'm afraid.

Anyone else out there who can help? DJ_Steve, are you?

 

im about, i dont get emails for pms for some reason so email/gtalk/msn easier to do probly

email:[email protected]
Google-Talk: [email protected] << am always online on herenear enough)
msn: [email protected]

 

looks like it hasnt partitioned drive properly again, id suggest running recovery, resizing the linpus partition down to as small as you can (leave ~2-3gb free space) then create a 20gb windows partition somewhere after that (leave however much space after linpus partition so you can resize it backup to size you want it to be after install) and try that as it may just work. again if you want morethan 20gb for xp leave enough space after it to allow resize later. once installed and working go back to gparted and resize partitonto your required sizes

 

A post to say thanks to the guys for a really helpful and useful guide, particularly as it doesn't assume everything will go smoothly!

A few things that happened on the way for me:-
- I didn't pay too much attention when gparted set the new ntfs partition as sda3 (oops!)so when WinXP tried to reboot I got the hal.dll error. No problem, I thought, I'll just edit boot.ini under Linpus as described.

Unfortunately, Linpus wouldn't boot either (reported "Can't load operating system" or something similar). So I fired up the USB key and booted into gparted live. I then started a terminal session and managed to mount the ntfs partition (mount -t ntfs /dev/sda2 /xpdisk) and then realised I didn't have mousepad to edit it.

Not being a complete idiot, and having used (in a very limited form) Unix machines back in the early 90s, I knew there would be other editors in place. Right clicking on the gparted desktop gave me two options - vim and nano. The UI for vim always frightens me (though I know some love it!), so I used nano. Ctrl-R to load boot.ini and changed the reference from disk 3 to disk 2 and (I think) Ctrl-W to save it (remembering to type the whole file path in so that it saved and overwrote /xpdisk/boot.ini).

Then reset the boot flag to set the ntfs drive as boot, shutdown and rebooted into the WinXP setup. All worked fine.

I still had a problem that Linpus wouldn't boot, but the instructions on reinstalling grub solved that.

Started about 8pm, finished about 10pm.

Now my only problem is that I installed XP SP2 with the drivers from the acer website. Unfortunately, it seems that XPs wireless connection manager or the atheros card are only recognising WEP, and my network is setup as WPA.

I'll have to spend some time tonight resolving that one (plugging into the LAN and downloading updates sounds a sensible step 1).

Once again, thanks - possibly the best and most complete idiots guide I've seen - and this idiot followed it and it worked!!

Matt

 

Rest assured that the guide was written by a Linpus idiot too, although not the actual information it was based on (by DJ_Steve who is a guru in all things).

Anyway I'm glad it helped. You certainly managed to workaround some issues in much the same way I did, so consider yourself un-idioted!

Now I'm very tempted to install Windows 7 instead of XP...

 

lol im not THAT good lol

 

Just an observation - I'm forever telling people that computers a dumb, and only do what they are told to do. But the idiots guide has a few sections where things "may" happen.

e.g. I followed the guide and ran into the sda3 / sda2 problem. I suspect that this is caused by the 1gb swap partition that is on my 120gb machine, and this is presumably there for most (?) users. So I suspect that in most circumstances the advice might be better written to suggest setting up the partition, and then always rebooting into gparted to ensure that the new partition is now called sda2 before starting the xp install.

But following that, I had the problem with Linpus not booting. That doesn't seem to be everyone's experience. Do we know in what circumstances the Linpus drive will fail to boot, after tinkering around with gparted?

I guess having a thread here which captures plenty of experience helps, but I have an unfailing desire to know why things happen!

Matt