Dual-booting XP with PCLinuxOS

Hi guys,

I currently have a XP pro machine with a second HDD (60 gig) for backups. I was thinking of copying all my backup stuff over to main HDD and installing PCLinuxOS on it. Couple of quick questions:

1) Can a format the HDD with this Distro or do I need to do it another way
2) After the install, can I easily copy all my backups back or is there more to do to be able to access the XP drive and vice-versa?
Also, anyone have thoughts on PCLinuxOS?

Thanks

 

Hi Tater,

If you copy all your backup stuff to your main HD, boot the live CD and install you should have no problems. Mounting a Windows drive under linux can be tricky. The Windows drive will be hda1 and you will need to mount it manually or through fstab. Google mount windows in linux and read a bit.

http://www.faqs.org/docs/lnag/lnag_drives.html

I use PClinuxOS stand alone and have not looked back, but like most linux converts always have more than one distro on the go.

PhilD

 

Since the most recent kernels, hard drives are no longer known as the hd* designation, but as sd*. It was once just for SATA, but extends to all drives now.

This is as of kernel 2.6.20+

Just keep that in mind.

 

The answers to both your questions is YES you will be able.

You can actually test this first with the live cd copying one or two throwaway files. You can even use cut&paste. Just so ez compared to the old ways.

have phun =)

 

Great, thanks everyone. I'll give it a try.

Would I have to do anything special with the mbr or boot partition as per this post http://forums.majorgeeks.com/showthread.php?t=108021
and would I get the choice of which to boot from on start-up?

Thanks