Has Anyone Installed Bodhi in Dual Boot with WinXP?

[BillD]

After installing Bodhi in a dual boot setup with Windows XP on the old laptop for which I was looking for a suitable Linux OS that would run on it and work with the wi-fi, etc., I got back into Windows to update some stuff and discovered when I tried to reboot the computer, that the MBR had been destroyed; I could boot into nothing because all I got was "label not found" as an error message.After many hours spent over the past couple of days running a variety of different malware scanning programs, and finding nothing, I was about to give up (I really only need Linux on it) when an on line friend sent me an email commenting that perhaps the problem was not malware but something else because she had heard from several people (she is in the Windows computer repair business) of cases where, with multiple boot systems, they had run into similar problems with Windows.So I hunted around and found an old EBD for Win98SE, booted from it and ran "fdisk /mbr" and that of course eliminated grub, but it also eliminated the problem; Windows XP rebooted perfectly with no problems . . . I have restored the Bodhi grub (which lists Windows in it of course or it would not appear in the boot list) but the problem has been driving me nuts for the past couple of days and I wonder if anyone else has ever seen anything like this?Thank you,Bill

[ChipDoc]

I'm only running the single OS on my machine, so take these as suggestions to try rather than as gospel. I don't really understand Grub at all, so I'll look at different options here. Do you really need dual-boot?1. VirtualBox offers a way to run XP under Bodhi (or any other distro, for that matter) and might do what it is you need.2. Wine might also be a viable alternative. I'm running the print control software for my Epson R2400 that way and it works great. I believe that most of the iterations of Office can be run under Wine.

[raymac46]

I've found historically that grub can get any Linux distro and XP to play together quite well. However since I've figured out how to use VirtualBox I doubt that I'll ever dual boot again. I can just run Linux as a virtual machine under Windows or vice-versa if I really need Windows under Linux.I've only dual booted when I had a Windows system where I wanted the Linux option available. If my machine is Linux only it stays that way.If you have restored grub is your Windows XP system now working? Have you tried update-grub?

Edited June 12, 2011 by raymac46

[burninbush]

I have restored the Bodhi grub (which lists Windows in it of course or it would not appear in the boot list) but the problem has been driving me nuts for the past couple of days and I wonder if anyone else has ever seen anything like this?Thank you,Bill

Maybe ... not exactly sure what you are asking, but everybody who dual boots has see something like that. Your Bodhi install overwrote the MBR. I haven't installed it here, but any linux would do the same if you give it permission to write to the MBR. I always tell the install to use the partition root instead. There's a slick solution to this; grub4dos. Copy a couple files onto C:\, and do a one-line edit to boot.ini, and then when you boot windows will give you a choice to either boot windows OR execute grub -- which will boot any of your linux installs. In short, with G4D you can get windows to chain to grub. But still, after that, you can't let a new distro write to the MBR else you'll have the same problem again.

[BillD]

These are interesting solutions mentioned above. I really don't want to run a virtual setup because I don't want to reinstall anything, and from what I have read in other posts virtual box installations run slower, and this laptop is not exactly speedy as it stands.If someone will explain to me how to move grub out of the mbr and into the root of the Linux partition, I could then do the dos fix for Windows one more time, add a 3rd party boot loader and as suggested above, that should keep the two systems separate. So how do I move Grub from the mbr to the Linux partition?Thank you,Bill

[burninbush]

So how do I move Grub from the mbr to the Linux partition? >BillD++++++++++++++??? Not sure we are communicating here. What I advise is 1) use the XP install in Repair mode to properly replace your windows MBR, and 2) extract grub.exe and grldr from the grub4dos package [zip file] and then 3) edit your boot.ini to add the line to start grub.exe running. That done, there is no need to further concern yourself with 'moving' grub anywhere. Indeed, once you have the ability to start grub.exe in your C: partition then you will not need to ever install another boot util [lilo, grub, whatever] for any later linux distro; you will simply edit the menu.lst file in C: to add the statements to boot the new distro. The text file with grub4dos explains this with examples.

[BillD]

Grub4dos looks interesting, but just after I posted above, I remembered that Acronis Disk Director would boot the existing grub as one entry and Windows as the other, so I installed ADD and then went into Grub and set it to boot Bodhi with no delay.Works great and allows me to boot either Windows repeatedly with no problems, or Bodhi as default.Thanks for the input,Bill