Please give suggestions on how to best handle
dual booting in this case:

- Two Drives. Both contain primary partitions
(Drive1 NTFS and Drive2 Ext3).

- Drive1 has WinXP installed and configured.

- I want to install CentOS and would like to be able
to boot to it.

- Preferably, if things go wrong with Linux, I should
be able to simply delete the partition to which the OS
is installed - *without any effects* on WInXP.

- Changing boot sequence in BIOS is an ugly option
which I am trying to avoid.

Thank you!

Dima

On Oct 16, 12:47*am, d...@no.email.thankstospam.net (DK) wrote:
> Please give suggestions on how to best handle
> dual booting in this case:
>
> - Two Drives. Both contain primary partitions
> (Drive1 NTFS and Drive2 Ext3).
>
> - Drive1 has WinXP installed and configured.
>
> - I want to install CentOS and would like to be able
> to boot to it.
>
> - Preferably, if *things go wrong with Linux, I should
> be able to simply delete the partition to which the OS
> is installed - *without any effects* on WInXP.
>
> - Changing boot sequence in BIOS is an ugly option
> which I am trying to avoid.
>
> Thank you!
>
> Dima

I've not done this, and am guessing a bit here... presumably a boot
loader like grub on a tiny 3rd partition would do the trick. BOIS
would be set to boot from that grubbed partition.


NT

On Oct 15, 7:47 pm, d...@no.email.thankstospam.net (DK) wrote:
> Please give suggestions on how to best handle
> dual booting in this case:
>
> - Two Drives. Both contain primary partitions
> (Drive1 NTFS and Drive2 Ext3).
>
> - Drive1 has WinXP installed and configured.
>
> - I want to install CentOS and would like to be able
> to boot to it.
>
> - Preferably, if things go wrong with Linux, I should
> be able to simply delete the partition to which the OS
> is installed - *without any effects* on WInXP.
>
> - Changing boot sequence in BIOS is an ugly option
> which I am trying to avoid.
>
> Thank you!
>
> Dima

I've PM on one machine (some really old crap on this) -- use them for
simplified, core binary OS installs (referenced to other drive
extensions where a bulk of add-ons go). Pretty much among the best as
far as freeware alternatives go for an arbitrator. XOSL -- not really
sure what that's all about, possibly a more formal treatment of
available OS flavors.

For what I need, though, PM works well.

I usually hide anything relating to one OS partition from another
being installed, and come back later gradually to test how they
interact together across shared resources. Having that binary sector-
to-sector copy is an advantage in case one doesn't like what the
other's doing. Then again, I don't like what WIN & friends is trying
to do to itself half the time, either, so the same principle applies
(along with various system monitor alerts, registry watchers, etc).

http://www.ranish.com/part/