I recently decided to install Windows on my home PC since I wanted to play some games, it’s been about 3 years since I started using Linux exclusively but thought a change would be nice. Since I didn’t find good guides I decided to write my own :)
Why would you want to do that? Well, back when I used to dual boot on a single drive I used to re-install Windows very frequently. Windows wipes out grub during installation so I needed to keep grub on a separate partition.
This guide assumes you have 2 hard drives; one for Linux and the other for Windows, you can do the same with a single drive but with minor changes.
- Install Windows on the first hard drive
- Install Linux on the second drive, and install grub on the master boot record of that drive
- Download Grub4Dos
- Save grldr and menu.lst to C:
- Edit menu.lst and put the following:
title Linux
chainloader (hd1)+1
rootnoverify (hd1)
- Edit your boot.ini and add the following line:
C:GRLDR="Linux"
Another way to do this is using bootpart. Make sure to install grub on the first sector of the boot partition because bootpart can’t read master boot records.
