dual booting on 2 separate drives
 

Ive looked through the post after doing a search and what i cant find or im really over thinking on is this, for the time being im keeping win xp on first drive, i want to install a second drive for my Linux distros. and what i want to know is do i put the second drive on ide1 as a slave or do i put it on ide2 as a master and reinstall the Linux Os's on the drive so they can be picked up at boot up. forgive the question im new on this with the dual booting and Linux Os stuff.

@ Reply
 

Hi sonic6765,

As far as I know it doesn't matter where you connect the second hard drive. The main thing is that the bootloader should be on either of the first two hard disk and not on any other hard disk.

Here is a link to How to: http://apcmag.com/how_to_dual_boot_w...lled_first.htm

In the above link you will find out a drop down box in front of related links and you can select which OS you want to dual boot with Linux.

Here is a great site which has several in depth tutorials on dual booting Ubuntu and Windows: http://members.iinet.net/~herman546/
There is a tutorial there for dual booting on 2 hard drives.
Although those tutorial use Windows7, the info is still applicable to dual booting with XP. If anything, dual booting with XP is more easily managable than with Windows7.

I have always preferred to put the Windows installation (caveat: never tried with Windows newer than XP) on a separate drive, mounted as the IDE slave. The grub bootloader then remaps the two drives and chainloads the Windows bootloader. This satisfies Windows that it is on the primary partition, and any messing with its MBR or bootloader is isolated from the grub bootloader. The Windows drive can be made into the only (master) drive in the system, and no other changes are required.

--- rod.

well thanks for the wisdom and advice. hooked up linux as master and windows as slave and so far its working great. which kinda scares me. lol the only 2 things windows has done so far is for some odd reason it lost the time on it and the usb mouse. which i thought was a little odd but so far so good. and i think all my other distros are ok even that im running an ati graphics card. and its an x800 sapphire. so again thanks and ill keep my fingers crossed on this thing.

You probably set the time to UTC when you installed Linux. Windoze requires "localtime", so change Linux to same.
Dunno about the mouse.

I wonder if Windows is just a little slow to pick up the mouse when you do a re-boot, rather than a hard re-set (shutdown -h now *as root*). Failing that, could be a driver issue with Windows.