Re: CHAT: Debian

Christophe Grandsire writes:
 > En réponse à Paul Bennett <paul.bennett@...>:
 >
 > >
 > > Another option (in Redhat and Mandrake, at least
 > > -- there ends my experience) is that the
 > > installer lets you make a Bootable Floppy, with
 > > LILO (I think) and some other stuff. This allows
 > > you to keep your Primary Master drive completely
 > > free of any Linux.
 > >
 >
 > That's what I want (because I don't want to partition my Primary Master drive).
 > Can you still have a dual boot system without any Linux on the master drive? I
 > want each drive to be devoted to one operational system entirely and
 > exclusively. Maybe I should put the second drive as secondary master... Well, I
 > have largely enough time to think about it, it won't be done before next year
 > at least :)) .
 >

It's certainly possible to have a dual boot system with no Linux on
the master drive.  You will, however, need some way of booting into
the Linux drive.  This may be accomplished by means of a bootloader on
the Windows drive MBR, a bootloader on a floppy, or possibly a
bootloading program run from within Windows such as LOADLIN.EXE (which
I suspect will work in WinME, although it's really a DOS program).

As long as you have a Windows drive with a FAT filesystem, you may
like to consider XOSL as a boot manager.  It installs from within
Windows, it's graphical, and it stores its data on the Windows
partition.

 http://www.xosl.org/

(Personally, I have an extremely complex setup here.  You see, I had
Win98, Debian and BeOS partitions on my 10GB drive, with XOSL as boot
manager, and then I got an 80GB drive.  Now I've set up Linux and
Windows partitions on the new drive, and I've actually installed a new
Debian system on there, with a GRUB bootloader on the new MBR.  But I
keep putting off the last few steps to completely migrate over and use
the new drive as the main one.  So now XOSL on the first drive boots
GRUB on the second drive, and then generally boots the existing Linux
system on the first drive.  Whenever I run out of space in the old
Linux system, I create new directories in the new system's
filesystem, and make symlinks to them in the old one.

I do not recommend this approach, but generally speaking it seems to
work.)