Dual booting Windowses with grub [Solved]

[davids45]

G'day,
I'm blaming cthisbear for my concern/predicament .

His post:
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 679#900679
introduced "tiny" versions of old Windows OSs which he'd found very useful.

So, as I had an old desktop with a 500GB hard-drive in the attic, I thought I'd give the 'tinies' a quick try. The hard-drive already had a large collection of older Pups in full and frugal versions, so to set up Windows, I had to sacrifice the 2 fulls in two primary partitions and format these to ntfs (about 11GB each one).

Tiny7 went in OK but, of course, wanted the computer all to itself. But by re-installing a Pup to another partition, I could recover multi-booting with grub4dos.

I've now installed a TinyXP into the other ntfs primary ('D' drive). TinyXP has now taken over booting, although it does recognise the C drive where Tiny7 is, and I can run programs with XP I loaded to the Tiny7 drive.

Has anyone an idea, if not knowledge, of the best way to run grub or grub4dos so I can boot my choice of either Windows (7 on sda1 or XP on sda2) or any of the existing Pups?

I'm proposing to re-re-install a Pup and during that process, install again something to the mbr and then if needed, edit the menu.lst to include both Windows as well as the Pups (e.g. run one for when I need to fix a Windows, I guess). I'm hoping (h0,0) and (h0,1) will do the trick separating XP and 7, but advice is welcomed.

I admit that the few MS-based programs I still use do run well under Wine, so I really don't have a good reason to be doing this, but "what the heck" (is there a "shrugs shoulders" emoticon?).

David S.

[nic007]

I have always installed my Windows operating system(s) first, then made frugal installs of my Puppies (just copying the necessary files for each puppy to its own subfolder) and then ran Grub4Dos to setup the boot. At one stage I had Windows 98, Windows XP and a lot of frugally installed Puppies set up for multi-booting as mentioned above. BTW - you need to install Windows in sequence from older to newer otherwise you will probably run into trouble. Windows 98 was installed on my first partition and windows xp on the second but sequently with windows XP installed after 98. Also, I would recommend to select the option not to overwrite the existing mbr when you install grub4dos, it's safer.

[davids45]

G'day nic007,

Thanks for the encouraging feedback.

I've just about done everything you suggest .... but backwards .

I started with an already Pups-full hard-drive and kept these as much as possible.

Because tiny7 was easier to find than tinyXP, I had tiny7 first, so installed it first, before I had a tinyXP iso.

I then wrote to the mbr when re-installing a Pup to be able to recover dual booting for the Pups and tiny7.

Handily, when installing tinyXP, I was offered as its install option, the empty ntfs partition I'd made for it (sda2 = 'D drive') so it did not overwrite the existing tiny7 in sda1.

If, with your old system of 98 & XP, grub4dos could separate these Windows versions, I'll go ahead and re-re-install a Pup and after again writing to the mbr, let grub4dos set up a multiOS boot system.

Luckily, I don't need this computer or hard-drive, so if it all goes belly-up, I'm not worried. And I can then have more fun trying to fix it all again .

David S.

[nic007]

G'day nic007,

Thanks for the encouraging feedback.

I've just about done everything you suggest .... but backwards .

I started with an already Pups-full hard-drive and kept these as much as possible.

Because tiny7 was easier to find than tinyXP, I had tiny7 first, so installed it first, before I had a tinyXP iso.

I then wrote to the mbr when re-installing a Pup to be able to recover dual booting for the Pups and tiny7.

Handily, when installing tinyXP, I was offered as its install option, the empty ntfs partition I'd made for it (sda2 = 'D drive') so it did not overwrite the existing tiny7 in sda1.

If, with your old system of 98 & XP, grub4dos could separate these Windows versions, I'll go ahead and re-re-install a Pup and after again writing to the mbr, let grub4dos set up a multiOS boot system.

Luckily, I don't need this computer or hard-drive, so if it all goes belly-up, I'm not worried. And I can then have more fun trying to fix it all again .

David S.

Yes, it seperates the Windows versions as your latest Windows installment should set a multi-boot option for the windows versions in its boot configuration file. So, in your grub4dos menu you will find an entry for Windows, if you click that the windows multi-boot screen will appear with the option to run your choice of Windows operating system. Do it in the sequence as proposed and you should not have a problem. Once you get it to work I may supply some more tricks...

[davids45]

G'day nic007,

Thanks for the follow-up and explanation for the Windows single grub4dos menu.lst entry.

I saw that in the menu.lst and thought it was not what I wanted for two Windows OSs so tried modifying the menu.lst to have an entry for each Win OS. But my attempt failed and the error message suggested I may need to re-install the Windows in the right order and put XP on 'C' and Tiny7 on 'D' .

I should have a bit more time to revisit this once freed from grandchildren minding - their parents are 'stuck' in Bali where the airstrip is undergoing "emergency repairs" (the asphalt is peeling?) and the airport is presently closed .

David S.

[davids45]

G'day,

Firstly, thanks again to nic007 for his good advice , and I suppose, to cthisbear for first leading me astray into this 'project' .

I now have an old 500GB hard-drive in an oldish desktop that I can boot to either Windows Tiny7 or TinyXP (properly XPsp3Lite) or any of its original ten or so Full Pups or any of its more than twenty Frugal Pups.

When I did the Windows versions' installs in the correct sequence and to the correct partitions (refer to nic007's post), I had a drive that would start with a boot screen to select either a 'Former version of Windows' (XP) or Windows7.

I had created two ntfs partitions as sda1 and sda2 of 11GB each. At the end, they were about 30% used for the particular OS.

I first installed tiny XP from a LiveCD, made from a downloaded XPsp3Lite iso, to sda1. Having no idea whether to leave the CD in or out during this multi-stop/start install, I ended up with two XP versions (WINDOWS and WINDOWS0 in the C:/Programs directory ). Surprisingly to me, both get offered at booting and the chosen XP will then run .

With sda1(C:/) having an XP that booted, I next installed Tiny7 from another LiveCD to sda2 - the install process offered this pick-a-partition option. Now I could start up to boot either XPs on sda1 or Tiny7 on sda2 (D:/).

The longest step was getting a Grub or Grub4Dos to take over booting so I could get back to having all the Pups equally accessible.

First go with grub4dos from a Puppy LiveCD where I said write to the mbr was OK. Failed and I needed to re-install the two Tinies. This was not such a big deal as these take so little time installing compared to 'kosher' versions - but still not as quick as a Pup install .

From a convenient MultiPup CD, I tried again installing grub4dos from a recent TahrPup and a Slacko and this time not to write anything to the mbr. During each attempt, I saw a file-missing message box, and at the end, nothing was working as far as multi-booting the hard-drive. I did however get a good menu.lst with all the Pups from this repeated futility.

I finally tried Grub from an older pemasu Wheezy Pup off my MultiPup disk, installing Grub into an existing Full Pup (to partition sda6, setting the boot flag to here in GParted) and this worked!

To the very brief menu.lst Grub gave me from this install (a Windows or a Pup!), I added all the old Pup boot entries from a previous grub4dos menu.lst to the grub list.

As nic007 noted earlier, to boot a Windows, I click Grub's one-and-only Windows listing which then goes into the multi-Windows options from the Tiny7 installation - XP or Tiny7.

To utilise the large (~320GB) ext2 data partition on the hard-drive already shared by all the Pups, I have installed a recent version of Ext2Fsd.exe to both XP and Tiny7. And finally, the two Windows programs that I use regularly to both XP and Tiny7.

Of course, those two programs already run very well in wine in all my Pups, so all this "Tiny" effort was in one sense, just a waste of time.

And I'll soon put this old computer and its elaborate booting back in the attic. Oh well, back to the house chores....

David S.