[plug] dual boot XP dominates

[G.Chester]

Trying to bring my son across from the "dark side" with a magazine cover
disc copy of Mandriva to put on his WinXP system. Since he's a complete
newbie I thought this would be a good starting distro (no, that's not meant
as flame bait).

Everything went swimmingly, with all cutting-edge hardware stuff recognised,
etc - and it was so FAST on his new spec PC (mine is steam powered, so I'm
used to 1 hour-plus installs).  But, then all that came up after the install
was XP with no boot loader menu in sight (grub was chosen).

I could give more details about what was done, but in the immediate sense I
want to know if this a known issue with XP retaining total dominance, or
whether I was too clever with choices of partitioning and location of /boot
and stuff and basically stuffed up the install.  I thought this question had
been answered so time ago and searched the archives, but nothing exactly
relevant.  A google-load of page hits talked about editing boot loaders and
reformatting MBR, but I thought maybe just trying to be less clever and let
Mandriva sort out partitioning and sectors on his system might be the easier
way to go in the short term.

What do you'all think.  Trust in the Mandriva developers and try again or
get down and dirty with config. files?

Regards, Gavin.