Dual boot to support desktops

Rebooting
Once Linux is fully installed, the system will automatically reboot, and you will be greeted with the GRUB boot loader screen (see Figure D).
Figure D
GRUB boot loader showing both operating systems
Choosing Windows XP from the list will start up Windows XP, as it should; choosing Red Hat Linux will start that OS instead. If you don't choose any OS selection, Red Hat Linux will start by default. If you forgot the portion during setup where you needed to tell the system that you also have Windows XP, editing the file /etc/grub.conf and adding the information will do the trick for you. Since you first need to know where everything is (i.e., where the Windows XP partition resides, etc.), you can use the Linux fdisk command to view this. To use it, issue the command: fdisk /dev/hda Once inside fdisk, issue a p command to print the partition table. The contents of my /etc/grub.conf to dual boot the system are shown in Listing A. You're good to go
When complete, you'll have a fully functional, dual-booting system with Windows XP and Red Hat Linux 7.3 residing on the same system. Running both operating systems on one machine will allow you to properly test the actual hardware on which you will be running Linux at a big savings.
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