[plug] Dual Booting

[John Clayton]

>I was going to partition my 20 GB hard disk into two 10 GB partitions and
>install Windows in one partition and Debian Linux in the other, but an ISP
>Help Desk person told me yesterday I would have problems doing that because
>each OS needs to start in the first 2-4 GB of the disk space.  He suggested
>I would be much better off with two HDD's because then each OS would
>automatically be in the first 4 B of its respective disk.
>
>Is that correct?
>I would appreciate any advice you can provide, before I proceed.

If your windows is an NT derivative (win2K or winXP) then it should have the 
nt loader. This can be used to handle the problem quite easily. Just copy 
the first 512 bytes of you linux boot partition after you have run lilo so 
that it is installed on the partition and NOT the MBR. These 512 bytes is 
enough to bootstrap the rest of the boot process. Copy this 512 byte file to 
you windows root and point to it in the boot.ini file. This will then give 
you the option of booting either your windows or linux partitions.

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