[lug] Dual boot from two hard drives, LILO

[D. Stimits]

Glenn Murray wrote:
> 
> This is certainly interesting.  How much trouble is it to swap the
> hard drives?  They are cable select, and it is easy to enough to swap
> the ribbon cable plugs.  What's involved with the OS(s)?  Naively, I
> would just replace "hdb" with "hda" in /etc/fstab, write lilo to hda,
> and have lilo point to hdb1 to boot Windoze.  Would that be it?

Simply swapping drives *can* work as far as getting both systems to
boot. However, it will badly confuse the windows system in some cases,
breaking installed apps. You do not have the choice of assigning drive
letters by hand, windows does that for you, and many apps are "hard
wired" to drive letters at the time of their installs. I wouldn't
recommend it, though perhaps you could use a backup and restore scheme
(doubtful though, it would have to swap "c:" and "d:").

D. Stimits, stimits at idcomm.com

> 
> I admit I haven't had time to try Dan's suggestion, though.  Perhaps
> later today.
> 
> Thanks,
> Glenn Murray
> http://www.mines.edu/~gmurray
> 
> On 2 Jun 2002, Hugh Brown wrote:
> 
> > In the past, it has been my experience that windows on /dev/hda and
> > linux on /dev/hdb will not work with lilo.  We always had to use a boot
> > floppy.  Lilo wanted to have a /boot partition on /dev/hda.
> >
> > I don't know what grub is capable of in that regard.  IIRC, grub claims
> > not to be stuck with the limitations that lilo has, whatever that means.
> >
> > Hugh