Has been following this thread and I might possibly be testing with Windows XP soon. Will update the results. - SP On Sun, Mar 14, 2010 at 5:09 PM, Michal Soltys <soltys@xxxxxxxx> wrote: > Tejun Heo wrote: >> >> I was thinking about testing XP booting this weekend but really want >> to avoid it, so thanks a lot for the info. I'll update the doc >> accordingly but can you please enlighten me on how it works and what's >> broken in detail? So, XP should be fine with any alignment? >> >> Thanks. >> > > Sorry for late reply. > > s/sp2/sp3 - although it shouldn't make a difference from sp2 onwards. > > Anyway - the tests I did were because of weird laptop, where I shrinked > whole win7 stuff and having no primary partitions left to use, I tested my > usual windows xp installation I deploy with ntfsclone. Originally that XP > were installed from installation disk merged with sp3 (or how it's usually > called in windows world - slipstreamed). Of course, windows xp itself will > not present any options to install itself into logical partition in the > usual way - but during later deployment it's not a problem to put it where > one's want. > > It's possible that this wouldn't work, if windows were installed first from > pre-sp2 media, and then service pack was installed (in such case, ntldr in > C:\ is not updated afaik). It's also possible, that "brute-force" copied > pre-sp2 or win2k to a partition made with either - a) xp sp2+'s disk manager > or b) mkfs.ntfs and with updated most recent ntldr - would boot as well > (the partition requirement is due to potential differences between the code > in bootsector, or more precisely - $Boot - first 8KiB of ntfs partition). > > Obvious requirements besides the above (ntldr, perhaps $Boot as well) are: > > - mentioned "hidden sectors" (must be manually adjusted, recent syslinux's > chain.c32 has option to do it automatically) > - adjusted boot.ini (to point to new partition, eventually other windowish > stuff as necessary) > > As you can see, there're many "if"s and combinations here that I didn't > test. > > On a related note - ironically, while I had 0 problems making it work > through syslinux (both regular chaining and through direct ntldr loading) - > I couldn't make win7's bootmgr (bcd, bcdedit ....) do it properly. Oh well. > > -- > To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in > the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx > More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html > Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/ > -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-ide" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
