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

[Justin Haaheim]

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)?

thanks,
justin

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
>
>  
>