[ale] Dual boot XP?

Jim Lynch ale_nospam at fayettedigital.com
Fri Oct 31 10:03:10 EDT 2008


I have an old Dell Dimension that I am using for my Trixbox/Asterisk 
server.  I'd like to upgrade the BIOS but from what I can see, Dell only 
supports upgrading from a Windows box.  This machine came with XP but 
since Trixbox wipes the HD when it installs, I elected to replace the 80 
Gb drive with a 200Gb drive so I have the 80 still around. 

To try to turn this into a dual boot system, I booted a gpartd cd and 
resized the Trixbox partition, mounted the XP partition via a usb 
connection and copied the XP partition to the unused space on the 200 Gb 
drive.  It ended up as /dev/hda4.  I used parted to do the copy and 
mounted it after the copy was made.  It looks OK.

I then editied grub.conf and added an entry:

root  (hd0,3)
     savedefault
    makeactive
    chainloader +1

Didn't work.  Got a blank screen when I selected XP from the boot 
prompt.  Waited 10 minutes but never saw a thing.  Keyboard was still 
active, however.  I was able to C-A-D reboot.

So did I miss something?  Or cannot I do what I wanted?  I could replace 
the drive and boot XP which might be what I have to do. 

Thanks,
Jim.


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