Michael, No. There are several issues here, and the discussion in this email chain mixes thing up. This has nothing to do with WinXP vs LVM. It has to do with the way WinXP want to install vs. the way you want to install. In all case, you will lose to XP. More specifcally, it has to do with the way Windows XP works with primary and secondary disks, and with the way XP works with partitions in each disk. What you want to do is wrong for your intended purpose. You can not install XP onto a slave disk in a multidisk host SUSEQUENT TO installing other Oses on the primary disk, without data loss, since XP would want to write data to a useable partition of the primary disk (after it formats the [first] paritition on the primary disk) regardless of whether you want to install the rest of the OS onto a partition on the primary disk or onto a partition of the secondary disk. This is why you have to install XP first, so that the boot info is saved. Once XP is successfully installed, you then can install other non-Windows Oses either: A. On the same partition of the same disk (some Oses) B. On a different partition of the same disk C. On a different partition of a different disk. If you'd done this, then the Primary disk contains 1 or more partitions, one of which is designated for XP, as recorded in the hidden system file in the root directory of the primary drive, in the partition you've designated to XP at the time of installation. For most people, the entire primary disk would be used, so the partition would be the first partition. This partition would have the size less than or equaled to the entire raw disk. Windows would, by default, designate this as "C:" drive. The "boot.ini" file would look like this: [operating system] Multi(1)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /noexecute=Alwaysoff /fastdetect Multi(1)disk(1)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT="Microsoft Windows 2003-X64 Enterprise Edition" /noexecute=Alwaysoff /fastdetect Upon a system boot, XP reads this boot.ini and display a menu of boot options within Windows. If you want to reinstall XP onto the 2nd/secondary disk, XP still have to write severla hidden system files onto a [NTFS]-formatted partition on the primary disk anyway; one of which is the boot.ini file. If there is another non-Windows, non-DOS, or previous incompatible Windows OS exists, XP will format that partition and wipe out the ther OS. This is why you always have to install [Windows] XP first before installing other non-Windows Oses. You should not care about whether Fedora exists in the primary or secondary disk. Instead, you want to install XP on the primary disk first, then install Fedore or whatever, on the secondary disk. This is the way XP is designed to work. Other Oses just have to to work around XP when it comes to multiboot. Good luck. Confucius. -----Original Message----- From: linux-lvm-bounces@redhat.com [mailto:linux-lvm-bounces@redhat.com] On Behalf Of michael Sent: Tuesday, December 18, 2007 9:28 AM To: linux-lvm@redhat.com Subject: won't dual boot: 2 disks and LVM I'm looking for a solution for (re-)installing WinXP on my slave disk when I have Fedora and LVM on the master disk. In the past I've opened up the box and unplugged the Fedora/LVM disk in order for WinXP to install okay. But this seems much too drastic. Even swapping disk order (in BIOS) doesn't help - WinXP installation sits there "forever" when checking current config. Whilst I cannot find any definite reference stating "MS WinXP cannot handle LVM" it does seem to be the culprit. Anybody got any such definitive references or other help? Thanks, Michael _______________________________________________ linux-lvm mailing list linux-lvm@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/linux-lvm read the LVM HOW-TO at http://tldp.org/HOWTO/LVM-HOWTO/ _______________________________________________ linux-lvm mailing list linux-lvm@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/linux-lvm read the LVM HOW-TO at http://tldp.org/HOWTO/LVM-HOWTO/
