I have two SATA hard drives, SATA1 and SATA2.
Windows XP is installed on SATA1.
I wanted Knoppix 5.1.1 on SATA2, and I hate GRUB.
So, I unplugged SATA1 and installed Knoppix on SATA2.
Now, I can use XP when both drives are plugged in,
but Knoppix installed on SATA2 will not boot, unless I unplug SATA1,
because the hardware profile does not match the installation, I guess.

Is there any way to make Knoppix boot when both hard drives are being used?

Thanks in advance

I should note that I use this type of set-up all the time with openSuSe 10.2, and all is well.

I just have never found an understandable explanation of how to fix GRUB once something goes awry...

I'm curious. Without a bootloader how does the machine know which OS to boot? Do you change the disk boot order in the system bios?

Yes, I just go into the BIOS and choose the hard drive to boot.

So I press two keys instead of one.

Technically, there is a boot loader installed, but only in the MBR of SATA2, and the only options are a couple of different kernel versions of Debian.

But happily for me XP is not included in the bootloader. The only way to get into XP is to go into the BIOS and change the boot order.

But this is my first Debian install, and I see that Debian is better at hardware detection than openSuSe, so that if I plug in the hard drive with XP on it, even though I'm booting the drive with Linux on it, Debian refuses to load.

I mean, it works great now, but I just want to close the case for once!

Can you help???

I don't know if this will work or not:
but there is a way to change the boot.ini (under XP) to allow the loading of
other operating systems using the XP boot loader to make the selection.
I have done it for when linux & XP are on the same drive, but different partitions!
Never tried it when XP and Linux were on different drives though!
So it might not work.