Guest penguino Posted June 19, 2005 Report Share Posted June 19, 2005 Am running MDK-10.1 dual-booted with Win98-SE (LILO). I want to upgrade the Win98 to WinXP using the MS upgrade CD. What problems might I run into? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ianw1974 Posted June 20, 2005 Report Share Posted June 20, 2005 The first and foremost problem is that after the upgrade, the MBR will be overwritten. This however can easily be solved. Boot from your Mandrake 10.1 CD after installing XP, and then press F1. Run with the rescue option, and you can get LILO to reset the MBR, and then you'll be able to boot as normal, with both XP and Mandrake. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jboy Posted June 20, 2005 Report Share Posted June 20, 2005 (edited) FAT or VFAT partitions can be mounted read-write, but NTFS partitions will be read-only, unless you try some 3rd party utils (I'd be careful about that). So if you want to share a read-write partition between XP and Linux on the same machine, you might consider leaving an FAT or VFAT partition so both OS's can read-write it, or use a removable USB drive. You didn't say that you would be doing this, but let's imagine this scenario: you get a new hard drive to install XP on and put it on your primary IDE channel, taking your original hard drive and moving it to the secondary IDE channel. Suppose, 10.1 was originally on /dev/hda5. Now it's going to be /dev/hdb5. So you'll need to change your lilo config and /etc/fstab. If you have a local network and XP Pro, a very nice new capability you didn't have with Win98 is to set up Remote Desktop in XP Pro, and then use rdesktop to access it remotely from Linux. I'm not 100% sure, but I don't think Remote Desktop is available with XP Home edition. Also, you could install vncviewer or ssh on XP and use that to access Linux remotely. And there's also samba for filesharing. Edited June 20, 2005 by jboy Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest penguino Posted June 22, 2005 Report Share Posted June 22, 2005 Thanks ianw1974 and jboy. I'll give it a try. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ixthusdan Posted June 22, 2005 Report Share Posted June 22, 2005 Anytime you need to service windows: 1) remove lilo first with the rescue on cd 1 2) Do the windows thing 3) Then reinstall lilo If you do not follow this order, you run the risk of windows attempting to "fix" yopu drive, which means take it over and wipe out your partitions/installation. Don't give it a chioce, and it will not try to take over, Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest penguino Posted June 25, 2005 Report Share Posted June 25, 2005 Thanks for all the help. The upgrade was successful. I was prepared to reinstall LILO and even had a copy of my MBR ready to go, but since I used a MS upgrade CD (not a new installation of XP), to upgrade from Win98SE to WinXP, the MBR was unchanged, LILO was unchanged, and FS stayed FAT32 (so it's still rw from Linux). In other words, a painless upgrade with absolutely no effect on the Linux partitions or the MBR. I suppose I may wish I had NTFS, but since I use Windows so infrequently, I doubt that it will make much difference to me. Thanks to all for advice. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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