Dual boot on separate physical drives (no partitioning)

[teddymines]

The faq tells how to dual boot on a single drive with multiple partitions, and also on separate drives to be swapped. I'm looking for a way to have linux on a separate physical drive, but not be required to swap.

IDE0 master: 60gb, ntfs, windows 2000
IDE1 master: cd burner

I have a spare 6gb drive that I'd like to use for linux only. I don't care about sharing data between the drives. What is the best way to install this spare drive and be able to dual boot? I don't want to reinstall/repartition/reformat the current w2k drive.

Thanks.

 

[Ynog]

Its actually much easier than doing partitions.

Just hook up the 6GB drive. Now I am not sure what distribution you are planning on installing,
but IIRC most are pretty easy. I use Redhat and now Fedora, so my explanation of an install
is going to be bias towards those, but I don't think the others are that far off.

Whenever you are install linux, it will ask you where you would like to setup the linux installation.
And your 6GB drive should be an option, just select it and leave the other drive alone. It will then
format it for you, and install it no problem.
And most installations will setup a boot loader for you. Some use grub some lilo. Neither is all that
difficult. It will have no problem differentiating between two hard drives.

So you will be able to dual boot no problem. The only problem you might have is if you ever take that drive out
You will not be able to reboot unless you clear your master boot record. Not a large problem either, just something to
keep in mind.

 

[teddymines]

Originally posted by: Ynog

...
So you will be able to dual boot no problem. The only problem you might have is if you ever take that drive out
You will not be able to reboot unless you clear your master boot record. Not a large problem either, just something to
keep in mind.

Wouldn't the MBR on my w2k drive still be intact, but simply not referenced at boot time? In other words, the MBR on the linux (6gb) drive would allow booting into itself or the w2k drive. Also, as far as configuration, the linux drive would be ide0 master, and the w2k drive would be ide1 master...or doesn't it matter?

Am I getting this all correct? Thanks.

 

[Ynog]

Actually, and I am not completely sure here. However, this is why I think I encounter a problem.

I had my drive 1, was master on IDE0 and I had drive 2 on slave IDE0. So I believe what I did
was when the bootloader was setup. It modified the Windows drives MBR to look for the second
drive in order to boot. Which is why I had a problem. If I had thought it out when I did it, I would probably
have thought of this. However if you put the linux drive as master IDE0, I believe (and could be wrong)
that the MBR on that drive will be used and will leave the other drives MBR alone. So you would not
run into this problem. However I just mentioned it because when i did it, like most people you don't think
about changing things to avoid odd problems like I mentioned. You would just have left the 2K drive were it was and
either installed the other drive as its slave or as the master on the other IDE. Thus opening the door for this potential
problem. But then again, losing a drive is a bigger problem IMHO.

Hope this helps.

 

[Ynog]

Just as a note. I believe the BIOS uses the first MBR on the first disk it searches. So I think (could be wrong again).
That it will look for the drive on master IDE0 first (by default). So that is where the MBR will be installed when installing linux.

 

[XHuskY]

You could try the FUN way, get a DPDT switch and some cables then configure the switch to switch master to slave and slave to master on both drives. The HDs are truly independent of each other.