Dual booting DSL - Two hard drives

Forum: HD Install
Topic: Dual booting DSL - Two hard drives
started by: russ1960

Posted by russ1960 on Feb. 02 2006,17:59

I have windows XP on hda1 and DSL installed on hdb1 - I installed the grub in hda1 mbr because I want to dual boot. Only problem is when grub comes up - there is no entry for me to boot to windows xp on hda 1 - just shows boot options to DSL.

How do I fix this? I am a newbie.

Thanks

Russ

Posted by robertbas on Feb. 03 2006,02:32

Heya Rus,

There is a way to do this and as a noobi too, i tried and tried. I left it till later, especially when I saw the error "dsl not on hda1".

To keep moving forward I parted hda1 for xp and hda2 for dsl. To avoid the long re-install of XP have a look at 'XP eXperience' .. It is 'cut-down' ver of XP, offers an 10 minute unattended install and is perfect for net while working out linux things....

I am really really keen to migrate to linux but so far, after RH6.2, Debian and DSL I havnt been able to get this or that working to my satisfaction

Posted by larkl on Feb. 04 2006,12:30

You need to edit the grub menu.lst file and add/uncomment the WIndows stuff there. YOu can find a lot of info about this using the search.

Posted by Russ on Feb. 04 2006,15:22

Ok - Here is what I found out - When you attempt to install either loader (Grub or Lilo) it is trying to install on the drive you have DSL installed on - In the situation I have 2 drives so it attempts to install to MBR on drive 2 not on drive 1.

After it fails it then asks me if Windows is installed on HDA1?

The installer should ask/detect windows first then ask a user if they want the booloader installed on MBR of HDA 1 -

Appears you just need to make a couple of tweaks to the installer to fix this? If it would attepmt to install to the MBR on HDA1 the 1st time out if would probably work and clear the boot loader issue.

I am a newbie - how do I make and edit a boot loader when one is not installed? I'd prefer to use GRUB since I have used other linux programs and it always seemed to work on my machine.

Russ

Posted by larkl on Feb. 04 2006,15:26

What I had to do was get WIndows working correctly as hda1, then physically move it to the slave position. Then DSL and grub on the new hda1. I'm sure there are other approaches that'll work