Hi all, Efter making search on dual booting on linux I found a number of similar mails in the achive but still it didn't solve my problem. I have a PC with winXP on it with only one hard disk 40 GB and 256 MB SDRAM. I have partioned it to C: (20 GB) and D: (20 GB). WinXP is installed on C: partition. Now I want to install RH 7.2 linux. I followed the steps written at http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/linux/RHL-7.2-Manual/install-guide/ I partitioned the system manually leaving the big disk (C:) alone and deleted the other one (D:), then created a linux swap partition (256mb), /boot 50MB and a linux ext3 partition (the rest, mount point "/") I selected Lilo as boot manager. Further I selected GNOME and KDE to be installed so that I can get graphical interface. Now when I start the machine I only get the linux there and no winXP to choose at boot time. Further I get text mode rather than graphical interface. To get back my winXP I do the following. Insert win95 boot disk and promt>fdisk /mbr and reinstall winXP and it takes me a quite long time before I get winXP working again. I have done this a couple of times. Now before I try once again to install Linux so that I can get dual booting I would appreciate if someone can help me in finding out what I am doing wrong so that I don't get the same problem which I have had for last couple of times. Sorry in advance if you find that this question have been answered already many times. Fact is that, I have tried my best to find the solution from the mail archive which can solve my problem but didn't succeed. thanks in advance regards /saleem

First off, its not necessary to reinstall winxp should lilo not show it as an option in the bootmenu. You just need to boot with the winxp cd, run the recovery console and and the command prompt type 'fixboot' and 'fixmbr' then reboot and XP should boot fine. Dual booting is easy, I use GRUB for my boot loader so thats what I will try to explain. Assuming GRUB is installed, type GRUB at the console prompt. At the grub> prompt type: root (hd0,2) setup (hd0) quit then edit the /boot/grub/menu.lst file as follows(RH prob uses 'vim' for the text editor, and quite frankly it sucks, I don't use it, so I can't help you with it): default 0 timeout 30 title=linux root (hd0,2) kernel /boot/bzImage root=/dev/hda4 title=winXP root (hd0,0) chainloader +1 that takes care of the dual booting. To get the graphical login you may have to run 'XFree86 -configure' to set up the XF86Config file if RH didn't do it for you at boot, and then copy that file to /etc/X11/XF86Config. Now I'm not too sure about RH as its config is most suredly different than the Gentoo setup I'm currently using. You may have good luck in the RH forums and asking questions there.

to get direct in the grafical mode ; edit the /etc/inittab file and change the line that reads: id:3:initdefault: in id:5:initdefault: