Making Fedora Core 2 and Windows play well together [LWN.net]

Making Fedora Core 2 and Windows play well together

Posted May 26, 2004 17:31 UTC (Wed) by newren (subscriber, #5160)
Parent article: Making Fedora Core 2 and Windows play well together

Wow, I'm really glad I saw this article on LWN. I might boot to my Window partition some time in the next year (no guarantees), and if I did, and this in fact affects me too, I'd probably waste several hours trying to track down the problem before eventually giving up and deciding that I just did something stupid and nuked Windows...and then boot back to Linux and forget about it. Now that I know, if Windows doesn't boot then I can just jump straight to the boot back to Linux and forget about it step without the hours of frustration. :-)

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Making Fedora Core 2 and Windows play well together

Posted May 26, 2004 17:35 UTC (Wed) by kay (subscriber, #1362) [Link]

Thats it!

The fedora team wants to nuke Windows from all harddisc ;-))

Kay

It's not Windows specific

Posted May 26, 2004 18:25 UTC (Wed) by proski (subscriber, #104) [Link]

The problem is actully not specific to Windows. The driver geometry should not be changed, whether I have Windows or QNX or FreeBSD. The installer has no business messing with the drive geometry. It's a bug. The only part specific to Windows is that it won't boot.

I hope Fedora will release a bootable floppy image that would revert the geometry to LBA. I suspect they are working on it already. It's easier to write and debug a script once that to explain even a simple thing to every user. But they should debug it really well. Besides, the script should restore the cylinder count to the correct value (not just for pedants).

It's not Windows specific

Posted Aug 3, 2004 18:46 UTC (Tue) by warpedMania (guest, #23722) [Link]

No indeed, it is not. I was using three OS's: windows 98 (fat32), OS/2 (hpfs) and Red Hat Linux vs. 8 (Ext2). After I installed Fedora over my old Linux and had the filesystem of that partition changed to Ext3, there was a big surprise: Windows would still boot, but OS/2 refused, even though all the data are still present on my HPFS partition. I am glad I had my holidays in the meantime, otherwise I might have damaged my preferred OS (OS/2 of course), trying to fix the problem. This is a stupid bug, and I think it deserves some more attention.

Making Light of it

Posted May 26, 2004 19:49 UTC (Wed) by AnswerGuy (guest, #1256) [Link]

... but you forgot to put in the part when where you mark those old MS Windows partitions as type 8e (LVM), run pvcreate and vgextend and make the space available to Linux at your leisure.

(BTW: I like LVM! Now that support is maturing and I forced myself to learn it it's nice to keep a few gigs of space unallocated and ready to toss into filesystem on a moment's notice. Online resizing/growing will make that EVEN BETTER).

JimD