Redhat loaded and running

TommyD · #1 July 1st, 2003, 03:14 AM

I took the plunge and loaded redhat. I meant to keep my primary drive connected, but in my haste I failed to do so. It looks pretty good. Been a long tim since I used netscape so I am getting used to the "look"

I have a few questions:

Can I now hook up my old XP drive and cofiure everything after the fact to have a dual boot system?

Sine I downloaded redhat I do not have a product ID# to register it. Now I fel stupid
How can I find the ID#?

TIA
Tom

twistedcranium · #2 July 1st, 2003, 03:33 AM

Whooohoooo....another PENGUIN! Let's all give TommyD an opensourced-salute!

Glad you got it up and running, and imho, you picked the right distro too.

First thing you're going to want to do with your linux version of Netscape is to visit:
http://counter.li.org/
and sign yourself as a linux user. LOL It isn't mandatory actually, its just a neat way of telling the world just how many of us are out there!

Secondly, the product ID is usually for those that buy a boxed (or web purchased) version. Don't worry though, you can support the linux cause down the road. With Red Hat, the registration number gets you a level of web/email support and a subscription to the auto-update service (similar to the Windows Update, but on a broader scale). So even if you don't have a number, you still want to sign up at the Red Hat Network site, there is a limited freebie level, but it will suffice for a newbie.
http://rhn.redhat.com

Lastly, for your WinXP detect question, can we assume that you let the installer use GRUB as your bootloader? If so, grub is a neat program in which it "automagically" detects OSes in your system.

TommyD · #3 July 1st, 2003, 03:57 AM

Registered user
319664
Time for some sleep

**smurfy** · #4 July 1st, 2003, 11:11 AM

Hmmm, you have 2 disks. One with RH & Grub which is currently primary master or hda0 for RH.
You have another disk with XP which was installed when it was the primary master so it's boot record will be looking for it at disk (0),rdisk(0),partition(1).

So you re-install the XP disk. For arguments sake lets say you change the XP disk to Primary slave.
RH boot sector will be found and Grub will load. It may automatically detect the XP boot sector and include an entry for it but I believe if you then try to boot it XP will not boot as it's on the wrong disk.
If you go the other way around and make th RH disk your primary slave, XP's boot record will load first, it will definitely NOT see the RH boot record and you'll just fly into XP.

p.s. I can only test this with Win2k and Mandrake/GRUB but I'd be willing to bet M$ haven't made XP smart enough to recognise that it's disk address has changed.

BUT I reckon a third party boot loader like XOSL or BootMagic may work and allow you to boot either. (I know XOSL allows you to trick the M$ O/S into thinking it's disk address hasn't changed.