[plug] dual boot XP dominates

[Richard Meyer]

On Thu, 2006-02-23 at 16:08 +0800, G.Chester wrote:
> 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.

Hmm, This is where we go back to basics - did you perhaps tell it to
install grub into the root partition, instead of into the MBR? I ask
because I KNOW that Mandrake (as it was when I used it) used to be very
dual-boot friendly (as are Ubuntu, SUSE, FC and a few others)
> 
> What do you'all think.  Trust in the Mandriva developers and try again or
> get down and dirty with config. files?

Try again and make sure where you install grub, and then if it's still a
problem, dig into your /boot/grub/menu.lst - that's my advice - FWIW 
> 
> Regards, Gavin.
> 
> __
-- 
Richard Meyer <meyerri at westnet.com.au>