Re: 2.6.x partition breakage and dual booting

Stephen Hemminger
2004-06-01T16:33:13Z

On Mon, 31 May 2004 20:08:21 +0200
Tomas Szepe <szepe@pinerecords.com> wrote:

> > This is really very simple. If you move a disk from a machine with a
> > different BIOS and you preserve the partition table geometry, you will
> > NEVER be able to install Windows on the drive. If you partition a
> > blank drive and use the wrong geometry, you will NEVER be able to
> > install Windows on the drive.
>
> I don't quite believe this. AFAICT the Windows 2000/XP install program will
> succeed no matter what, the only problem is with getting the dirty thing to
> boot AFTER install has completed. If it craps out, boot off the install
> CD to the repair console prompt, run fixboot/fixmbr and all should be swell.
> If you need dual boot, you can go ahead and reinstall lilo/grub at this point.
> The one scenario unfixable without a hex editor that I know of is installing
> Windows on a partition that was created using mkdosfs -F 32 (and even that
> will sometimes work)

Having suffered through this "Daddy, why did you break the computer?".
I can say that fixboot/fixmbr will not work.

What did work on my machine was changing the BIOS setting on the boot disk
from "Auto" to "Large disk". As I remember there were several possible settings
and it took trying all of them till one worked. Still not sure why it worked
though.