We Talk Coding - How do i have and use two operating systems on my pc?

How do i have and use two operating systems on my pc?

I have a 40GB hard disk with windows xp on a 20GB partition and linux 9 on the other 20GB partition. I formated the harddisk with windows xp which i installed. I then installed Linux 9. I however cannot access the windows partition. When the sysem boots it goes straight into Linux without giving me the option of going into windows. When i invoke the 'fdisk' command however i can see both the partitions. I would like to access and work with both operating systems. What do i do?

Public Comments

Use System Commander, this will both of these system to be used. It costs a little but well worth it. Make sure you have a good amount of memory. You can test System Commander I think, they have a demo version, but if you bak up your system, it should be safe.
there is a problem with your bootloader. re install linux. While formatting, use dis druid. It's also better to have 5 or 6 partitions in 40 gb hdd. format the linux partition with ext3 and windows partition with fat32
What is the first person said is another way of doing it or you can do it by bying two hard drive and install different operating system on
You don't need to buy a program to be able to dual-boot operating systems. When you say "Linux 9", I'm assuming that you mean Red Hat Linux 9. During the install process for Red Hat Linux, you are given the option to add an operating system to your bootloader (in this case, you would have needed to add Windows XP. Your bootloader controls what OS's you are able to boot up; generally, this bootloader will be named Lilo (old) or Grub (better). Either way, the solution is to add a Windows XP entry to your bootloader. If you have Lilo as your bootloader, I really can't help you much, since I use Grub; in that case, Google would be your friend. However, since it seems that Windows XP wasn't configured as an entry for the bootloader during the install, I would have to assume that you left the default options for the bootloader when you installed; that would mean that you use Grub, which is a fine default choice. There are two ways to add that entry to the bootloader that I know of: one, you could reinstall Red Hat and add Windows XP as an option there; or, two, you could just manually add the entry to your bootloader (takes less than a minute and may require a few reboots). My solution of choice would be the second one, and it should be yours, too. On your Linux system, navigate to the /boot/grub/ directory on your "Linux 9" install. If you list what's in that directory, there should be a file called "grub.conf". Open that file, and you will see the title, root, kernel, and initrd entries for your Red Hat install. If you also see an entry for Windows XP (in case you did configure it on install), then all you would need to do to have time to go into XP is set the "timeout=" number to a higher number; really, I do that anyways to give myself enough time to choose during a dualboot. Back to the title and such, that is your boot entry for grub. That specifies how you will see the OS, how Grub needs to load the OS and from where it needs to load it. For Windows XP, you will need to add this to your bootloader, with a change: title Windows Xp rootnoverify (hd0,0) makeactive chainloader +1 That would allow booting into Windows XP if your Windows partition is your first on the HDD (which it is) and if the HDD is an IDE or SATA drive (which is probably is). Since you can use the fdisk command to see both partitions, do that and see which partition is set as an "NTFS" or "FAT32" partition. Put that partition name (should be "hd" and a number, or "hda" and a number) in the first part of the parenthesis after "rootnoverify" above. Reboot, and you should have an entry for Windows XP now. If it doesn't work at first, it may take a bit of tweaking, but that is the general idea for dualbooting.