[LAU] [ot] a little help with bootloaders...

A. C. Censi accensi at gmail.com
Thu Aug 20 09:50:38 EDT 2009


I have several installs of Linux, Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7
using grub in MBR without problems, since 2002. Currently my laptop
has VIsta, Win7 and Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic development with experimental
version of grub2 and ext4. One desktop has WinXP and Ubuntu 9.04 and
9.10 with grub1 with ext3.

Normally WIndows is installed first, and grub install in Linux could
find and chain the Windows boot loader correctly. Grub2 even found and
could boot the HP recovery partition of the notebook. The changes from
Winxp to Vista in boot configuration are already supported in grub1
and 2.

If you have to reinstall Windows, the Linux boot MBR will be
overwritten and grub should be reinstalled. It is not very complicated
and there are several howtos in the wild. Google is your friend.

In Ubuntu/Debian you need to boot a livecd,  and reinstall grub.

I think that with RPM based systems is easy also.

The Ext3 installable FS driver from http://www.fs-driver.org/ works
well for reading and writing ext3 partitions from Windows. But beware
that it has a problem with recent installs of Linux that default to a
larger inode size than the hardcoded one in in the extfs driver. So
you have to force mkfs.ext3 to use an inode size of 128 to get it
working in Windows:

>From http://www.fs-driver.org/faq.html
What features are *not* supported?
    * Inodes that are larger than 128 bytes are not supported.

Last, it is a freeware, with closed source. There are other
alternatives not well polished.

Reading and writing NTFS partitions from Linux works very well with
the NTFS-3G fuse implementation. It is default in Ubuntu from some
time and I use it everyday in work.

ACC

On Thu, Aug 20, 2009 at 10:13 AM, Mark Knecht<markknecht at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 20, 2009 at 5:54 AM, TheOther<theother1510 at sbcglobal.net> wrote:
> <SNIP>
>> In Linux I could view the entire Windows drive which was formatted in
>> FAT or FAT32.  The reverse was not true since I was using EXT3 for the
>> Linux drive.
> <SNIP>
>
> Even this doesn't have to be true. I use the Windows EXT3 driver and
> can both read and write my EXT3 partitions. Note that for safety I
> typically reserve a single EXT3 linux partition for doing this and
> don't mess with any of my important system level partitions.
>
> I've used this for 2-3 years on my XP machines without any problems,
> but of course I cannot guarantee anything. Please read all the
> documentation as there are limitations, none of which are a problem
> for me but might be for others.
>
> Cheers,
> Mark
>
> http://www.fs-driver.org/
>
> http://www.fs-driver.org/faq.html
> _______________________________________________
> Linux-audio-user mailing list
> Linux-audio-user at lists.linuxaudio.org
> http://lists.linuxaudio.org/mailman/listinfo/linux-audio-user
>



-- 
A. C. Censi
accensi [em] gmail [ponto] com
accensi [em] montreal [ponto] com [ponto] br



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