I didn’t thought it was so easy to install Windows on a pure Linux box. Just get something like the SystemRescueCD with gparted on it, resize Linux, leave some place for a boot partition (grub) and create a new partition for Windows.

My layout looked like:

1GB grub + kernel
20GB Windows
130GB Linux

Two problems occured during the flight… because I used gparted to format the Grub partition and the Windows partition.

The first problem (I think it wasn’t formatting-related) was that Windows misdetected the partition order. Installation went fine, but after rebooting the following error occured:

hal.dll missing

After correcting the partition in the boot.ini as suggested in http://www.informationsarchiv.net/forum/topic15028.html Windows booted. Editing was done with ntfs-3g and caused no problems.

The second problem came up after copying the kernel + grub into the new boot partition. Grub setup was successful, but after a reboot, grub stopped with:

Error 2

First thought was… 1GB is to big for some strange reason. But that wasn’t it. Later I found the answer here: http://www.fedoraforum.de/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=15316
Grub with a version 0.97 or smaller isn’t able to boot from an ext3 partition with an inode size of 256, which is the default from the SystemRescueCDs gparted.
So I formatted it again with inode size 128, installed kernel + grub and it was done.

Bye
Sven