It's time for Windows XP to die...

[helios17]

...well die on my hda anyway. I need help in doing it. I have two hd installations, hda is xp and hdb is knoppix. I want to run another linux ditrobution on hda but I also know that my mbr is there as well. I do not know how to reformat hda and retain this mbr so I can dual boot my hdb with my new hda linux distro. what would be the easiest or safest way to do this

thanx

helios

[baldyeti]

You haven't told us which boot loader you are using (lilo/grub/NT), so it's hard to be specific. Just install to hda, but don' let your other distro install its BL to mbr, choose root (/dev/hdaN) instead. Later you'll need to add your new install to your hdb knoppix (via lilo.conf or menu.lst).

[robwelch100]

it won't matter, You can install the new os and when it loads you can choose to load its boot loader. Grub is great and is standard with the likes of SuSE. When you install the new os simply choose to load its boot loader in the MBR. When the boot loader installs it will detect other the os and place a boot option for that partition. You can get help in the forums should you encounter any problems. I have 5 distributions of linux installed on my machine. The last one I installed was SuSE 9.1 all the other boot loaders are installed on the partition instead of the mbr and so I use the SuSE installed grub to load the other distros.

[smitty_the_smith]

As long as you install a modern (recent) linux and don't mess with hdb you should be fine. A multi-harddrive dual-boot is the easiest and most forgiving way to dual boot. The new linux should work fine.

P.S. if it's one of those non-gui install types like Gentoo you might have problems.

[helios17]

I am either gonna put the newest kanotix I have (BH09) or Xandros on there to test drive it. I am a bit clueless about mbr except when I screw it up and cant get back into my windows partition I do an fdisk mbr and I can reboot into windows. With windows being buried at sea today I did have concerns about how to get this done. If I run into problems, I will let you know.

thankx

helios

[helios17]

I booted to BH9 and did kanotix-installer, got to the partition part, converted my fat 32 partitioin to ext3 and now I am a bit stuck. I have two other partitions, one at 0.03 mb and one at 4.something mb. I realize one is my mbr and one the larger is the swap file, but once I converted the fat partition to ext3, the other two went from "free" to hidden. what do I do from here?

thanx

helios

[baldyeti]

The MBR is _not_ a partition, just the very first 512-byte block of your HD. I think cfdisk is the clearest partitioning tool to use. Delete all existing partitions from your hda, then create a swap, a root, a home. Mark them with the correct type. I dunno about the kanotix installer, but it should then run mkfs/mswap according to the way you've marked your new disk slices, and proceed from there.

[user unknown]

If I didn't oversee something here, you may use the same swap-partition for multiple linuxes - no need to create an extra one on hda.