Friday, August 17, 2012

Dual Booting Debian and Windows XP


I've been running Debian Linux on my personal computers for years. Recently my son found a Dell Optiplex 745 (one of the small format machines that I prefer) at a very reasonable price – with a valid license for Windows XP. It was time to upgrade both software and hardware.

As my old Dell GX270 (with Debian Lenny) was working just fine, I decided to try for a dual-boot install on the new box.  I found this tutorial online.

I downloaded gparted, as suggested, and burned the iso to a CD. I then cleaned up the Windows XP installation and did a defrag. I ended up with the large majority of the 80Gb disc free.

I then booted gparted and followed the tutorial to shrink the Windows partition to ~ 20Gb. A re-boot proved Windows XP was still happy.
 
I downloaded the latest Debian Testing – Wheezy – as a netinst (network install) iso and again burned a CD. After connecting the new machine to the network, I booted the netinst CD and did a routine install for a desktop. Things went well until the install asked me if I wanted to install the grub bootloader on the MBR. At this point grub was supposed to detect the Windows XP partition and edit the grub menu accordingly. But it did not. I had no choice but to continue with the Wheezy installation.

Wheezy booted fine, but I had no easy way to boot to Windows. Some quick research revealed a problem with grub detecting the Windows partition during the Wheezy install. The note said that running (as root):

grub-update

would repair the problem. It did. Grub detected Windows XP and added it to the bootloader menu.

I then had a dual-boot machine with Debian Wheezy (testing) and Windows XP. Both run fine.

I would not normally bother with Windows, but there are still several Amateur Radio Windows applications which do not have a functional equivalent in Linux – notably antenna modeling software.

Plus, it was interesting to try my first dual-boot..

WB5BKL - Nick

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