Hi, I know this is a webhosting forum, but I figure you guys are all linux guru's anyway so i'm gonna ask you. I'm trying to dual boot Windows XP and Redhat Linux 7.1. The problem is this is on my laptop that doesnt have a floppy (it has a cdrom though :) ). At first, my C: drive was NTFS, and Linux didn't like that. I reinstalled WinXP on a 2gig FAT partition. THen I installed linux with LILO on the MBR. It booted fine once. After that, everytime I try to boot linux (I dont remember the error anymore.. its been a month or so) I get some kind of partition/hd/xxxxxx error. Now everytime I boot the computer, it gets the LILO boot manager and I can go into Windows fine, but not linux. In fact, when I try to reinstall linux, I get a ...invalid format?... error. I got that before and I just deleted the linux partition in FDISK.
Is there a way to find out what files I need on the boot disk and just burn it to a cd and boot off that? Or How do I get LILO to boot linux & windows.

Thanks

Oh, and if you are asking why I just dont go buy a floppy, it's because if I do, i'm going to get a USB one and those cost like $60 which I don't want to spend right now. :blush:

I've got RedHat 7.3 and XP on dual boot on my PC, following the instructions here - http://www.poopoccurs.com/linux/Dualboot.html

This way, you don't need a floppy to boot up, but you do need one to follow the process given there. If you've got a shared drive between both OSs, you could probably use it instead. You can set up an extra FAT32 partition when installing Windows, and then set a mountpoint for it when installing Linux (or mount it manually, or set it up to auto-mount on boot by editing the fstab file, I forget the directory). An NTFS partition won't work under Linux (generally). But essentially, you should be able to use this partition rather than a floppy to follow the process at the URL above.

The other method I was going to try was burning the boot disk image to CD and using it to boot (not because I don't have a floppy, but because the floppy boot is so slow). Redhat.com has some info on creating a boot disk from memory. All you need to do is copy a few files from the installation CD. I didn't try it in the end, as I got the HD boot working instead.