Problem with dual booting Linux

[JohnB]

So a while back I thought it'd be a good idea to dual boot Linux on my laptop because Windows was getting really slow. I partitioned my HDD and installed Slitaz on it.

Everything was fine until one day I decided to boot back into Windows, when I did this within GRUB it turns out that Slitaz had overwritten the master boot record for Windows. So I put in a XP installation disk to try and fix the problem, this made things slightly worse. I ended up repairing the Windows install but somehow managed to install another version of XP which gives me a "registry file failure" also the Slitaz install has been borked. So there's two XP entries in the boot menu, one works and one doesn't.

My question is, how do I get rid of the bogus XP install? Should I just use BCD as mentioned here?

Second question, I want to give Linux a second chance, this time with Debian. Again, i want to dual boot. If I install Debian it won't do something silly and overwrite the boot record again will it? How do I insure it doesn't? The manual just says install Debian after Windows.

[scatter]

I suffered from same problem two years ago when I had windows yet installed and this article helped me solve the prob , so hope it does same with u

http://www.slackbook.org/html/booting-dual.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

btw , u risk to have same prob again when there is a new version of grub , so make sure after u update grub to verify ur disk partitions and grub configs before shutting down the system or rebooting

[bad_brain]

well, of course GRUB overwrites the MBR when you install Linux after Windows, but usually that's no problem because it picks up other OSs..so obviously something went wrong there.
can you post your partition scheme?

and well, you should have went for Debian right from the start, at least when it's not on a "I don't care if I have to format the whole crap again because it messed everything up" HDD...that's why I always recommend Debian (well, one of the many reasons), I never had any problems with dual boot. just GRUB is behaving a bit odd sometimes so I recommend to go for LILO right from the start (you can pick it in the install dialog later).

the best option, at least imo, is to use 2 HDDs, each with its own MBR, and then pick the OS to boot from BIOS by setting it as first HDD....that's how I did it a long time and it keeps you away from messing up both OSs at the same time when trouble occurs.

[JohnB]

Alright I managed to get everything up and running.

I couldn't use Easy BCD in the end (XP not supported), so I had to edit the MBR manually in notepad.

After that I just did a debian net install and GRUB automatically found XP. I made sure to put GRUB on the root file system to preserve the original MBR if anything went wrong.