[lug] Re: linux dual booting on separate hard drives

[Ed Hill]

On Tue, 2003-02-11 at 22:01, Justin Haaheim wrote:
> I have windows xp already installed on a disk that is actually wired as 
> the slave but acting as the primary booting disk (this is how i switch 
> between oses now (switching which hd the bios looks at to boot)).  Can I 
> re-install grub into the mbr on that windows hard drive, keep the 
> existing windows installation in tact, and have all of linux on the 
> second hard drive?  Is there a problem with writing to the mbr on the 
> windows drive (overwriting something important)?

Yes.

This (overwriting the Windows MBR) is exactly what I described below.

Ed

> 
> Ed Hill wrote:
> 
> >On Tue, 2003-02-11 at 21:03, Justin Haaheim wrote:
> >  
> >
> >>Ed,
> >>I was reading through some of the boulder linux user group archives and 
> >>came across this:
> >>
> >>I'm dual-booting a few machines with RH 7.2/7.3 and either W2K or
> >>WinXP.  One of them has multiple hard disks with different OSes on
> >>each.  On all of them, I'm using grub and it works great.  I think grub
> >>is *much* nicer than Lilo in many respects (eg. config editing, no
> >>1024-cyl limitation) and I highly recommend it.
> >>
> >>
> >>I have a machine with two 40gb hard drives on which I'm trying to dual 
> >>boot redhat 8 and windows xp.  I've had a great deal of trouble getting 
> >>the dual booting to work.  When I try to run winxp through grub, it 
> >>prints the commands to run windows (rootnoverify(/dev/hdb  etc. etc.) 
> >>and does nothing.  Can you tell me how you set up one of your similar 
> >>systems to correctly dual boot?
> >>
> >>many thanks,
> >>Justin
> >>    
> >>
> >
> >
> >Hi Justin,
> >
> >Generally, its considered good (n)etiquette to keep discussions on-list
> >so that they will be archived and people can "Google" for them.  So I'm
> >posting this to the BLUG list.  In future, please send your questions
> >directly to the BLUG list and not to me.  You're more likely to get help
> >that way.
> >
> >
> >So I'm currently dual-booting WinXP and KRUD 8.0 (essentially, Red Hat
> >8.0) on one of my X-ray controllers.  I used the following procedure:
> >
> >  1) installed WinXP in a small-ish partition on the primary drive and
> >
> >  2) installed KRUD 8.0 and specified the GRUB boot-loader in the MBR 
> >     of the primary drive.  The KRUD (Red Hat) installer automatically 
> >     recognized the WinXP install and created an entry for it within 
> >     Grub.  I then manually (Disk Druid) partitioned all the remaining 
> >     space on both the first and second disks as various Linux (ext3) 
> >     partitions.
> >
> >  3) Done.  Grub works great, booting both KRUD 8.0 and WinXP.
> >
> >Note that its important to install Windows versions first since they
> >usually don't "play nice" with other OSes.  If the above doesn't work
> >for you, then please send a an email to the BLUG list with a description
> >of what you did so others can help you diagnose it.
> >
> >Ed
> >
> >  
> >
-- 
Edward H. Hill III, PhD 
Post-Doctoral Researcher   |  Email:  ed at eh3.com,  ehill at mines.edu
Division of ESE            |  URLs:   http://www.eh3.com
Colorado School of Mines   |    http://cesep.mines.edu/people/hill.htm
Golden, CO  80401          |  Phones:  303-384-2094, 303-273-3483
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