Thanks Carl, that's pretty close to the command I read about. (dd if=/dev/hda[x] bs=512 count=1 of=linux.lnx) This should work with GRUB as well, correct? LILO doesn't seem to like the fact that I'm booting from a hard drive on a Promise controller. My boot sector would thus be hde6. Sorry Florin, I am booting XP by default, my wife is not as understanding as yours :-) What do you suggest for a swap partition size with 512mg of system memory? At 02:44 PM 11/4/2001, you wrote: > > I'm going to do a fresh install of Mandrake 8.1 on a dual boot system with > > WinXP. I've read that making a 7mg /boot partition makes it easy to use > > the Windows boot.ini file to choose operating systems. > >you don't need that, with recent versions of LILO, and a BIOS made in the >last few years. >the way it works (if I remember correctly..) is that you make your / >partition the location of the linux MBR; then use dd to take the first 512 >bytes of that, and make your boot file from it. >so basically: >dd if=/dev/hda2 of=linboot.img bs=512 count=1 >then copy the resulting 512-byte linboot.img file to your windows partition, >and add an entry in your boot.ini file for it. I seem to remember actually >doing this myself, at some point; and it was really simple and quick to do. > >at that point, Linux becomes one of the options on your (NT|w2k|xp) boot >menu. > >Carl Soderstrom >--