Ok, Someone told me I could make a duel boot using a Windows hardrive as a slave, and my linux drive as a master. Well I set up my windows drive on the same computer, and my bios reads it as a slave drive (primary), and linux is my primary drive. My question to you is how do i get the GRUBloader to reconize this drive, to allow me to access windows? Or possibly my friend is jus an idiot and i cant do this, either way please help.

Thanks.

my understanding is that you can only boot Windows from what the BIOS regards as the first hard drive.

The normal advice is that Windows should always be installed before Linux on the same machine.

That's right.
If you want have the full set of available installations,
First install Windows 98
Then install widonws 2000 or XP
Then install Linux.
If you are installing Mandrake, choose LILO, and everything will be easy.

I know windows has to come first, on one harddrive, but i have seperate harddrives.

yes and if you have two drives windows must be on the first (or only) partition on the first hard drive i.e the master one.

GRUB doesnt directly load Windows like it does Linux it loads the original bootsector which is preset to BIOS drive number 80h - the first drive.

Thats why it has to be on the first harddrive.

Im running WInXP Home on IDE Raid 0 array, running Mandrake 10.0 2.6* on a single harddrive on Primary IDE channel 0. After installing windows on my raid array I went into my system bios and set my IDE hdd as my boot first drive and then booted onto Disk 1 of Mandrake 10 and installed it using lilo as my boot loader. My first foray into the world of linux and I like it. Runs great I don't have to change anything back in my bios. I just choose weather I want to load windows or Linux at bootup from the LILO boot loader gui screen. Neat.. trust me and do it.. is easy

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