There has got to be a better way...

I'm working for a college right now that is using a ghost server to image it's machines (pretty standard for the most part). My problem is, this is the only place that I've worked where it's all dual boot, and fedora ends up taking precidence over the boot sector... It's causing a problem in that, we are expected to image someones hard drive if they bought there own (remember, they own the actuall pc...) Is there any way to encapsulate the windows and linux partition, and get them to run off of something more reliably and all encompassing... The wa;y we have it set up now, It's hard to take care of anything. The boot record is set off of linux, yet, most of them use windows. Obviously, re-imagimng a windows partition, is only a quarter of the battel on this one

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Comments

Mishra

What are the purposes of dual booting? Can you suggest that they reinstall with XP and run Linux OS off of a virtual machine on their system?

mrhaun03

do you know what boot loader is being used....GRUB or LILO???

techgeek07

The purpose of dual booting, is that I work at (I don't quite know what to say here) enginering college. It's Olin university, It's a dedicated engineering school, but, it's not known well yet. Anyway, at some point, the they decided that it ( and windows recovery) should go on every laptop whether they're mech eng, or network eng, or anthing else. We are using Grub, right now. While I understand how it works, I'm not the best at it. Either way, It's causing partioning problems with anything deferent then the standard image. (partions are getting messed up, as we have four different classes with coincidal upgrades on pc's). Is there any way, to make one image fit any size?

techgeek07

ps. I'm having a hard time with grub (probably because I don't know much about linux) but, If I reformat the windows partition, all I get is a grub error until I re-install fedora.

mrhaun03

i'm no linux expert by far, but i think you'd be better off using LILO.

techgeek07

What is the difference between lilo and grub?

techgeek07

They're already using VS's for pretty much everything ( a worry in and of itself). Most of our network is virtual servers, and even though we're dedicating threads, we're starting to outgrow it.

mrhaun03

techgeek07 wrote:

What is the difference between lilo and grub?

to be honest, i'm not real sure. but i heard previously that LILO is better when dual bootin with LINUX and Windows. you would have to do more research on the "why" part of it.

Sie

Is the system made up of just the two partitions?

Or is there more?

When you say it takes presidence do you mean it boots straight into Linux or do you still get the Grub menu to choose?

Can you post the contents of the grub (im not a guru but maybe someone will spot something?)
(Should be in /boot/grub/grub.conf if i remember correctly)

Are you able to run the boot: rescue command from the Fedora CD and re-install the grub boot loader using the custom option?

sprkymrk

I'm pretty sure the Ghost documentation states that it won't play well with linux, but I could be wrong on that so don't quote me.

I don't think using LILO will be any better than GRUB, since GRUB is the more recent boot loader.

So are you asking about a way to change partitions after installing the image, or are you asking if you can just load a Ghost image of XP to the partition hosting XP in case XP gets messed up but leave the Fedora partition/install untouched?

Is there any way, to make one image fit any size?

My answer would be to use 2 hard drives in each computer if possible instead of 2 partitions.

Tesl

mrhaun03 wrote:

techgeek07 wrote:

What is the difference between lilo and grub?

to be honest, i'm not real sure. but i heard previously that LILO is better when dual bootin with LINUX and Windows. you would have to do more research on the "why" part of it.

Your Wrong.

taktsoi

i have the similar configuration in the lab environment, which is dual boot with winxp and fedora. we use grub as a boot loader.

yes, ghost doesn't do well with linux, but doable. when you create an image, please use sector-to-sector command line parameter in your configuration boot floppy disk.

although this takes long to complete imaging, but this assures that linux will boot without any problem.

just my 2 cents