Grub and DSL on hdb with WIN on hda

Forum: HD Install
Topic: Grub and DSL on hdb with WIN on hda
started by: larkl

Posted by larkl on Sep. 21 2005,13:21

Well,

I was so impressed with DSL (frugal) on my old box that I added a second drive to my 'good' PC and did a frugal (grub) install on /dev/hdb. Now it seems very clear (ah hindsight) that having WIN on hda isn't going to work as grub is now the bootloader on hdb. So, I have a completely invisible DSL installation (ha). I see some info re- Wingrub, not sure that I want to go there. Not really up for a complete re-do. Could perhaps ooch a few gigs out of hda with a partitioning utility.

Am I right that the PC is always going to use the bootloader on the master (hda) drive? Options other than Wingrub?

Posted by larkl on Sep. 22 2005,11:25

I figured it out. I moved the Win drive to the slave drive and did the frugal install on the new master drive. Took awhile to get grub to find the drive. WOrking great!

Posted by Your Fuzzy God on Sep. 22 2005,15:05

Just a heads up. Windows will problably have problems (at least in the long run) if it is not the "C:" or hda1 drive. The registry is pretty picky about it. I don't know a whole lot about dual booting, but you should be able to install grub to your windows drive by booting the DSL live cd and following SU's instructions < here. >

Good Luck!

Posted by larkl on Sep. 22 2005,15:33

So far it's working OK. If it starts to act hincky, I'll start over and maybe just put it all on the same drive. XP runs better when it's re-installed everyonce and awhile anyway.

Posted by cbagger01 on Sep. 23 2005,04:57

Luckily, Windows XP attaches the drive letter to the physical hard drive/partition ID number and not the IDE hard drive cable connection.

However, your Windows bootloader DOES use the cable connection to figure out where the boot partition is located. But this can be fixed if needed by editing the boot.ini file from the Windows recovery console.

What you DON'T want to do is have two bootable Windows XP drives connected to the same computer at the same time. Windows will then automatically render one of the drives permanently "unbootable" unless you do some under-the-hood work to fix it, both the bootloader and the drive letter assignment.