[Ilugc] Help - Installing Linux with win2000
- From: siva@xxxxxxxxxxx (Sivasankar Chander)
- Date: Thu Sep 30 15:25:23 2004
Some time back, there was only Win98 in my machine.
I installed redhat Linux 7.2 in the Windows Filesystem itslef(FAT32).
That is, without creating any separate partition for Linux. The whole
Linux would sit as a large single file in Windows and that large file can
be seen through the Windows explorer itself. If I want to load Linux, I
will insert the boot floppy of linux(which I created during
installation). Otherwise the system will load Windows 98.
I don't think it could have been RedHat 7.2 - this was probably Xandros
or Lindows or something similar.
So, I want to install linux with / in windows 2000 as I had installed
with the machine which was having Win98(As in the first paragraph of this
mail).
It can't be done, NTFS is not write-safe in Linux. So there's no way that
the booted Linux system can write data back into the NTFS partition. You can
probably cook up a initrd-based, ramdisk-only
distro that can be booted using loadlin.exe from Windows, but it's still
going to be 3 or 4 files, and will only work from 95/98/ME if at all. You
can probably pack all of the files into a self-extracting executable to
make it a single-file executable, but it's a huge compromise on
functionality. Any changes that you make still can't be saved on a ramdisk-
only distro.
Instead of all this, you can simply use Knoppix and boot from CDROM each
time.
-Siva
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