[lug] Multi OS booting

[David L. Anselmi]

William Petty wrote:
[...]
> If I ever boot with either SCSI drive missing, the bios remaps them and 
> nothing boots until I re-run setup and re-order the drives.
>  Windows on sda (ID=0),
>   Linux on sdb (ID=1)
>   Data on hda (Mapped last)

I would think that removing sdb or hda would leave Windows unaffected in 
this scenario.

> So, I guess I am up and running, as long as all additional drives have 
> higher IDs.

Is that really a problem?  The only thing you really need to be able to 
find is the boot loader.  If you can't count on a drive with GRUB being 
found you could run GRUB from a floppy.

If you insist on moving drives around then your boot menu and fstab may 
not match.  But in grub you can boot from the shell without needing a 
correct menu entry.  And if you can set up mount to use labels or UUIDs, 
or udev to name your partitions consistently you won't need to change 
your fstab.  You could also look for a BIOS that numbers drives the same 
no matter what you do to the hardware.

Windows doesn't seem to like partitions that get moved around.  So 
either don't do it or talk to the people at 1-800-642-7676.  Or don't 
use Windows.  The Windows wizards may know how to make it work though. 
If nothing else, there's VMWare.

> Thanks for all of the suggestions. I just wish grub's boot sector 
> (Stage1) had the drive/partition info in plain text so it could be
> easily edited. That would have save me two day's worth of futzing
> around!!

Umm...  I must be missing something.  The menu keeps that info in 
menu.lst, not the boot sector.  If you boot into the grub shell you can 
see what grub actually sees, it isn't "saved" anywhere.

Dave