Dual boot without prompt

[orirunaway]

I have Windows XP and a Linux installed on my computer. GRUB installed on MBR. On booting, there is a prompt on which I can select what OS I am going to use.

Now here's what I want (if its possible), I wanted that there would be no prompt to appear and the default booting would be the Windows XP. BUT, if there's a way that there could be a key I could press while booting to make it show the prompt and select the OS I want to use (Just like pressing F8 while startup to show which media does the computer will boot: CD-ROM, Removable Drive, HardDisk).

The reason why I'd like to do this is because I am not the only one who is using the computer. And I don't want them to meddle on the other OS installed.

I hope someone could help me. :(

[Paul Komski]

I don't know of a way of doing this with GRUB - though that doesn't mean there isn't a way.

BiNG (in my sig) can quite easily accomplish your tasks but it requires that GRUB is first installed to the linux partition and not to the MBR and that there is also available a small FAT16 32MB PRIMARY partition (would be sufficient) for BiNG to utilise.

Read the pdf file in the BiNG download for full details or post back here. You can password protect the boot manager itself and any individual boot items appearing on its boot menu. You can also set any OS to be the default and then hide the boot manager at boot-up but configure the settings (Enable IT Mode) to bring the boot menu into view by pressing <insert> during startup.

PS if you create a new PRIMARY partition then you may need to edit boot.ini - it depends just where the new primary is created and which partition table it uses - but BiNG can also be used to edit boot.ini even on NTFS partitions.