Ok so here is my dilemma--

I have two hard drives one running windows(40Gb seagate) and the other running ubuntu(40Gb Western Digital). I am trying to find the best configuration to allow me to boot from both drives but without altering the windows MBR. Is this even possible? If it is not possible what would be the simplest way to to configure my drives?.

When I installed ubuntu I unplugged the windows drive as to not get it mixed up with the drive that I wished to install ubuntu on. Ubuntu installed successfully and works fine. Now to boot into either OS I need open the case and switch the drive drive manually to "master".

I am new to Linux so any help is appreciated, or if someone could point me to a thread with a similair question that works as well.

Thanks a lot!

How about just swapping the boot-order in BIOS?

What kind drives are they .
I use 3 drives sata GRUB written on each MBR of each drive and only change the boot order of the drives in the BIOS to change OS
On the other hand if Ubuntu is on boot able drive change the bootloader of Ubuntu in that way that it also boot up windows
I am not a Ubuntu user but nearly all distro give the option where to write GRUB and mostly also recognize windows and
put automaticly the lines in the bootloader , but you unplugged the windows drive it did not notice windows

With the ubuntu drive in the "master" position the windows drive does not even show up...
Im not sure if the ubuntu drive shows up when when the windows drive is in the master position though.. I will have to check

by the way I'm using a IDE system if that makes any difference

How would i do this?

Thanks

They are IDE drives, not SATA drives

Set the drives to be 'cable select'.

Do you have two ide channels? Put one drive on ide0 as master and one on ide1 as master

The easiest way to dual-boot is the way you chose not to do during installation. Ubuntu would have detected your windows OS and created and entry to boot windows in the Ubuntu/Grub/menu.lst file. Since you chose not to do that, there are several other ways to dual-boot.

1. The way you are currently doing it, moving drives.
2. Changing boot order in BIOS.
3. Having the Ubuntu drive as 1st boot/master and putting an entry in the Grub menu.lst for windows.
4. Having the windows drive as 1st boot/master and putting Grub in the mbr of the windows drive with entries in Grub for windows and Ubuntu (this would change your mbr on xp)
5. Having the windows drive as 1st boot/master and editing the boot.ini file for an entry for Ubuntu so you can boot both xp/ubuntu.
6. Creating a boot floppy/CD specifically for your system and using it to boot.

These are the most common methods so you need to decide which you would prefer as the methods are different for each solution. Options 3 and 4 would probably be easier than the other methods. Up to you. Post back and someone should be able to give you specific instructions. Before posting, I would suggest you boot into Ubuntu and run the command: sudo fdisk -l, and post the results.

Thanks for all your help guys! Much appreciated!

I think I am going to reinstall Ubuntu with both drives plugged in and see if grub will automatically configure for a dual boot...if that essentially you are telling me to do...

Cheers,

Iceman99one

Yeah, that should work fine. I installed suse with windows installed on the same drive (different partition obviously) and suse found it just fine and put an entry for windows in the grub for me. I never had an issue.

I never went back to windows tho.