Re: [UUG/MLUG] Hdd's?

[Jonathan King <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

On Mon, 3 Jan 2000, Mike Miller wrote:

> On Mon, 3 Jan 2000 EMAIL:PROTECTED wrote:
> 
> > Sure they do, I've got Linux, 98, and W2Krc2 on the same drive as 
> > happy as windows can be. [snip]
> 
> I have a colleague who told me that he's running both Red Hat Linux
> and WinNT 4.0 on one drive, and he was accessing the NT (FAT 16, I
> think)  partition from Linux.  One day he tried to boot NT, but it
> failed.

And this is bad because why? :-)

> He told me that it was clearly because Linux had somehow affected NT.  
> I don't remember the messages he was getting, but he was never able to
> start NT.  Does anybody know more about this?

Dang, this is news to me, and I have the identical set-up: NT and Linux on
one big drive.  And my home machine has been a dual-boot Windows/Linux
since the 0.98 days.  I've never had a problem this way, but, truth to
tell, I don't toss that many files over onto the non-Linux side.
 
> For now, until proven otherwise, I'll have to take the position that
> there are some dangers in running dual boot on one HD.

Well, I'm an empiricist at heart, so I used google, and searched for "NT
linux dual-boot one drive".  Hit #5 was:

http://d0server1.fnal.gov/dual_boot.html

And, lo and behold, I read:

  In order to get NT/Linux dual boot working on {dnt40}, we have tried
  out many different combinations and sequences, most has a lot to do 
  with boot loaders. We have started out with LILO which we believe, at
  that moment, had a problem due to the capability of the corresponding
  Linux fdisk which was not able to handle an IDE drive with a size
  greater than 8.4GB.

[snip]

  In both cases of failures, we have seen that the Linux portion booted
  well while the NT boot resulted in a crash (Blue Screen of Death) of
  the OS at the time of Boot due to an infectious record on the
  MBR in Window NT's point of view. In both cases we had Windows NT
  installed in the first section of the hard drive, followed by
  Linux partitions. 

[and then more tidbits.]

So something like this can happen, but, in this incident, anyway, seems to
have been caused by Lilo.  A footnote to this is that my machine (babar)
has no such problems, but has a big SCSI disk, and I use the NT
boot-loader to load both NT and linux (via lilo).

jking