At Thu, 14 May 2009 15:41:02 +0100 CentOS mailing list centos@centos.org wrote:
Sorin Srbu wrote:
Hi all,
You know how I asked about procedures to build a dual-boot system with CentOS and WinXP a while ago? Well, I I've begun with a test machine.
What I had from start was a working CentOS 5.3 32b system. What I did was to just add another empty drive configured as slave and then boot from the Windows install cd.
The most curious thing happened now, I get a blank screen after the Windows installer screen saying something about "Setting up install procedure..." just at the beginning. That is to say, this happens only if the hd with CentOS is connected to power. If I disconnect the power connector to the CentOS drive, the Windows installer happily goes on.
Is this to be expected, that Windows won't install if it sees a hd with another OS as master?
Thanks for any hints.
It's a known issue - I've seen it affecting other distro's (Fedora in my case). It's a Windows XP thing, not specific to the distro, and only affects WinXP afaik (doesn't affect Win2K, couldn't care less about Vista). I first came across it trying to install WinXP on a system that had previously had Fedora on it and the installer hangs at a black screen. The "solution" is to do as you've done and disconnect the drive. If it's a single drive system, then install Windows first for dual booting, or if you just want to reinstall Windows over the top of a previous Linux installation then remove all Linux partitions with fdisk first.
Windows NT 4.0's installer also is wonky if the first disk is not available for the MS-Windows install. I had this problem with a SCSI system and ended up re-numbering the drives making the disk with the existing Linux install drive #1 (/dev/sdb) and the 'new' drive for MS-Windows NT 4.0 drive #0 (/dev/sda). In the OP's case, this would mean making the disk with Linux installed the 'slave' (/dev/hdb) and the new disk (for MS-Windows) the 'master' (/dev/hda). The OP would then have to boot up with a rescue disk to fix the /etc/fstab file (unless it uses labeled file systems) and re-install the boot loader.
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