dual boot Win XP on a USB-connected hard-drive
Bob Tennent
hard-drive in an external USB-connectable enclosure (and Fedora 10 on
the internal hard-drive). I want to be able to boot to the external
hard-drive (when it's connected of course). Can grub be configured to do
this? I find the grub documentation rather impenetrable.
Bob T.
Douglas Mayne
Really? Even if you start from the beginning? Try thinking of Grub as a
thing unto itself and see if that helps in understanding its
documentation. I would say GNU/Linux is _way_ more complicated than this
little bootloader.
>
> Bob T.
>
The bigger question is whether Windows will boot to a "system partition"
on USB. IME, it will not. YMMV. If you are sure that Windows works with it
booted directly from USB (and its C: drive on USB), then I'm interested in
seeing how you accomplished that. IME, the only way Windows can be
have its system partition on a USB drive is when it is booted as a virtual
machine (say from VMWare).
Booting from USB means different things to different people. If you want
to load a bootloader from USB, then the only thing you need is hardware
compatibility. To begin using a Linux kernel and root filesystem stored on
USB may require a few more items.
If you were wanting to boot Linux with its root filesystem stored on USB,
then that is a different story. I know that works. I have written about
Grub and booting from USB before. It seems that Google is not doing as
good of job of indexing my posts as it used to do- I may need to start
building my own index. I did find this:
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.os.linux.setup/msg/836ea53a39efbb1e
I know there are more examples that I have written, but are "lost in the
ether today."
--
Douglas Mayne
General Schvantzkoph
Install VMware Server 2.01 on your system and then install an XP VM on
that. VMware Server handles USB devices very well. Dual boots are a last
century solution, VMs are a much better way to go. With a VM you can run
your Windows programs while running Linux. I'm running VMware Server 2 on
Fedora 10. I have a Win2K and a WinXP and they can access USB 2 devices
just fine. The way it works is that VMware has a menu that lists all of
the USB devices that you have attached to your box, you use that menu to
connect a device to a particular VM. With something like a printer that
means that it's either connected to a VM or to the host system, you can
switch back and forth at will. With your IPOD you would just keep it
connected to the XP VM all of the time.
Bob Tennent
> On Sat, 25 Apr 2009 22:23:57 +0000, Bob Tennent wrote:
>
>> I need to use Windows to access an iPod Touch. I have Windows XP on a
>> hard-drive in an external USB-connectable enclosure (and Fedora 10 on
>> the internal hard-drive). I want to be able to boot to the external
>> hard-drive (when it's connected of course). Can grub be configured to do
>> this? I find the grub documentation rather impenetrable.
>
> that. VMware Server handles USB devices very well. Dual boots are a last
> century solution, VMs are a much better way to go.
That's what I thought too, so I installed Win XP on a kvm/qemu host and
then discovered that qemu doesn't support USB-2 passthrough. Groan. But
USB-2 support is apparently being worked on so the dual-boot scenario
would be a temporary stop-gap. But thanks for suggesting VMware.
Bob T.
P.S. Can anyone tell me whether Apple will allow me to export my music
(and, crucially, my playlists) from my iPod to *another* iTunes? It took
me hours to set up playlists for all of my albums because Apple thinks
they know better than I how I want my music organized.
General Schvantzkoph
KVM isn't there yet. It has great performance if you don't do any virtual
IO, in fact it's better than VMWare, but it's virtual IO performance
sucks. I haven't benchmarked it lately but phoronix has and their
results are consistent with what I saw last year when I did my last eval,
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=intel_corei7_virt&num=1
I plan to play with KVM again when F11 comes out but I suspect that I'll
be sticking with VMware for another year or so. VMware is a mature
product that has well balanced performance. The free version lacks
support for virtual disks (you have to use NFS or SAMBA mounts) but the
NFS and SAMBA performance is very good, head and shoulders above KVM. It
also has very good support for USB devices, I haven't tried that on any
other virtualizer. The only downside of VMware is that you have to run
the config script every time you upgrade a kernel. The new browser config
interface has lousy performance, much worse than the interface that they
had in VMware 1, but you can live with that because you hardly ever need
to use it.
Hactar
General Schvantzkoph <schvan...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> On Sat, 25 Apr 2009 22:23:57 +0000, Bob Tennent wrote:
>
> > I need to use Windows to access an iPod Touch. I have Windows XP on a
> > hard-drive in an external USB-connectable enclosure (and Fedora 10 on
> > the internal hard-drive). I want to be able to boot to the external
> > hard-drive (when it's connected of course). Can grub be configured to do
> > this? I find the grub documentation rather impenetrable.
> >
> > Bob T.
>
> Install VMware Server 2.01 on your system and then install an XP VM on
> that.
Tried it in VMware Player. iTunes wouldn't recognize the device. So I
chunked out 10G primary and a 5G secondary partitions (the latter is for
programs) and it works with XP.
> VMware Server handles USB devices very well.
Didn't try that.
> Dual boots are a last
> century solution, VMs are a much better way to go.
So-rry.
> With a VM you can run your Windows programs while running Linux.
Yes, assuming you have enough RAM. The laptop only has 2GiB, which
makes for a rather tight Windows "machine".
> With your IPOD you would just keep it
> connected to the XP VM all of the time.
I almost hacked it in the VM, but each time it disconnected / reconnected
VMware popped up a dialog to announce its presence, so I would have to
dismiss the box, navigate through the menu and connect the device.
Apparently I took longer than the program's timeout.
--
-eben QebWe...@vTerYizUonI.nOetP royalty.mine.nu:81
A neutron walks into a bar; he asks the bartender,
"How much for a beer?" The bartender looks at him,
and says "For you, no charge." -- GooberMcFly on Fark
General Schvantzkoph
I've been able to run VMware Server on 2G machines just fine, I set my
W2K or XP VM to 512M which is enough assuming that you aren't using them
for any sort of heavy duty work. I only use Windows for Quickbooks and MS
Office and to download an old Garmin GPS (which I've done using the USB
connection on VMware), so a 512M Windows machine is more than adequate.
That said you'll be much happier if you max out the RAM in any machine
that you are using for VMs. In modern desktops that use DDR2 that means
8G (which can be had for about $90) and modern laptops that means 4G. In
the last generation DDR machines its 4G and 2G respectively.