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Booting Windows and Linux using the NT loader

April 20th, 2008 Mohammad Al-Shami No comments

I recently decided to install Windows on my home PC since I wanted to play some games, it’s been about 3 years since I started using Linux exclusively but thought a change would be nice. Since I didn’t find good guides I decided to write my own :)

Why would you want to do that? Well, back when I used to dual boot on a single drive I used to re-install Windows very frequently. Windows wipes out grub during installation so I needed to keep grub on a separate partition.

This guide assumes you have 2 hard drives; one for Linux and the other for Windows, you can do the same with a single drive but with minor changes.

Install Windows on the first hard drive
Install Linux on the second drive, and install grub on the master boot record of that drive
Download Grub4Dos
Save grldr and menu.lst to C:\
Edit menu.lst and put the following:

title Linux
chainloader (hd1)+1
rootnoverify (hd1)

Edit your boot.ini and add the following line:

C:\GRLDR="Linux"

Another way to do this is using bootpart. Make sure to install grub on the first sector of the boot partition because bootpart can’t read master boot records.