Dual booting - 2 HDDs - Win XP/Linux

[Murpheeee]

I have 2 HDDs in my system, the main one is an 80GB with Windows XP and all my data. The other is a
15GB with Caldera Linux.

At the moment I swith between the two by physically switching over teh IDE cable.

I woudl like to make a Master/slave configuration and have an option when I switch on which one to boot
to......presumably I need a third party program (like BootMagic) to get this to work? If so, any free
ones?

 

[Brutuskend]

I'm Tri booting (98SE, XP Pro, 2000 Pro) and I get the option at boot of which OS to boot to.
If you go into the repair console in XP and do a MBR repair it should look over your system, find that you have dual OS's and change the boot to give you that option aswell. 🙂

To get to the repair console, start a install of XP and during the install choose repair, then repair console...
Good Luck! 😉

 

[Murpheeee]

cool thanks...I'll give it a try

if I am not back in a day or two you will know I screwed up 😉

 

[Brutuskend]

BTW: In the repair console if you have a question about any of the commands, type the name of the command, then HELP and it will explain what that command does...

 

[Murpheeee]

well I tried that....didn't do anything

maybe Win XP doesn't recognize Linux as an OS ?

 

[Brutuskend]

Thats possable...I thought of that after I posted.

Maybe Mico$oft doesn't play well with others...... (NO WAY!!) 😉


OH well, I thought it was worth a try...........Maybe someone else can help you out............

 

[Brutuskend]

Someone (sorry I don't remember who) makes a hard ware solution to this problem.
It's a switching box that fits in where one of your CD roms would go that allows you to choose your boot OS.

Only other fix I can offer...... sorry.

 

[AndyHui]

This is how you do it.

 

[MikePikeFL]

I was just going to post that same information. I have another related question tho... What do you do when Linux is on the primary boot drive, and you want to install Windows on a secondary drive? Windows wants a partition on the primary hard drive, but I don't want to do that... My friend solved this problem by changing the boot order in the bios, but I don't have that functionality (we are both all SCSI and his TigerMPX bios sees the scsi card).

 

[AndyHui]

Windows only needs its boot files on the Active Partition on the Primary drive. That's it. You can install Windows to any partition, so long as boot.ini, ntldr, ntdetect.com and bootsect.dos are located in C:.

 

[MikePikeFL]

Thanks for the info! I would do that, but I have a Linux RAID array on that drive and can't really modify it... but I did find an option for my SCSI controller that fools windows into thinking its the first drive (the boot drive). Unfortunately I knocked a capacitor on my motherboard and have to order a new one!!! What a day... what a day...

 

[Brutuskend]

Well I tried..

Good info there Faq man!!

 

[Murpheeee]

Originally posted by: AndyHui
This is how you do it.

Well I tried all that, it worked up to a point.

I have the two boot options when I boot up, if I select Linux however.....the screen goes black, the word GRUB appears in top corner, then it hangs indefinitely.
It boots fine from the floppy.

Any ideas whats wrong?

 

[drewshin]

hi, i have a similar setup to yours. i have a 30gb c: drive with windows xp, and a 60gb f: drive with mp3s. i had about 30gb free on the f: drive so i put redhat linux 7.3 on a partition in the free space.

i had trouble also, when i first installed redhat, i got the grub screen (with the blue & white background), then when i selected linux it worked fine, but windows xp did not boot when i selected it, it would just go to the grub prompt.

i found that it depends on what you select during the install process...which unfortunately ive forgotten now. i spent about 3-4 hours trying differnt things and it finally worked. i'm at work, but when i get home i'll try remembering what i did to get it to work.

also, when you get the grub graphical screen at startup, you might have to edit the /etc/grub.conf file to get windows to work right. it kept looking for windows on what it calls device 2 (f🙂, when it was actually device 1 (c🙂