I have no IDE drives on my system. I had two SATA drives with Windows XP Pro on one and data files on the other. I installed a third SATA drive specifically to use for Ubuntu 7.10. However, when I install to the new drive, and then remove the CD as instructed, I go directly to Windows on the reboot.

PLEASE NOTE: I've tried changing the boot order in the BIOS so the Ubuntu drive goes first; the BIOS complies easily, but then on reboot the system hangs at the "Boot from CD?" prompt.

I have read that I should make changes to GRUB, but I can't even access the Linux drive to do so. I do not have RAID turned on, BTW. Also, XP recognizes all 3 disks with no problem.

I would appreciate help with this. Thank you.

Tom Ewald
Detroit area

Where did you install Grub? Did you install it to the first harddrive? By the sounds of it you didn't do the latter. One way you can do this is to install Grub to the hard drive with the Ubuntu on it and then map your windows drive in the Grub menu.lst take a look at this link it will give you a good example of how to do this.

Booting tips

Isn't the install CD for Ubuntu a liveCD? Meaning you can boot and run that as a Linux system itself.

While in that Linux system, you can see which partition you have Linux installed in (such as /dev/sdc1 if it is the first partition of the third drive and if naming is following the usual rules) and you can mount that partition and modify files in it including the menu.lst file that tells the stage 2 of grub what to do (once you've managed to get stage 2 of grub actually started on that drive).

Also in that liveCD mode, you can run the command line version of the grub installer. I don't know what the GUI installer for Grub in Ubuntu lets you do. The command line version lets you do what you want. In this case, you want to reinstall GRUB with stage 1 going into the mbr of your third hard drive (meaning it goes in /dev/sdc if drives are named the way I expect from your post).

The last complication is figuring out which number the third drive should have inside menu.lst. If the drives were numbered normally, then the original installer probably numbered it '2', which may be correct. But when the BIOS changes boot sequence for the SATA drives it might also change the numbering of the drives in menu.lst, so your third drive would still be sdc in Linux but when grub gets control from the BIOS it might be '0'.

All of the above assume you want to use the BIOS to control the dual boot, so you want Windows stage 1 loader to stay in the MBR of physical drive 0 and Grub's stage 1 to go in the MBR of physical drive 2.

The more common method is to put Grub's stage 1 in the MBR of drive 0, destroying Windows stage 1, then put something in menu.lst to allow Grub to transfer control to Windows during boot.

Another way is to use DD to make a copy of Grub stage 1 (after figuring out where it was installed or reinstalling it to the partition boot sdector). Copy that with dd to a Linux file, then through whatever media you can access copy that to a file in C:\ of the windows system. Then edit the Windows hidden file boot.ini to tell it to boot Linux through that file.

Johnsfine:

Thanks for your reply. Being as I'm such a newby at this, I'm not sure how to do what you say, but it does sound logical, and it gives me something to aim at. Thanks, again.

Especially since I was describing three different (mutually exclusive) ways of setting up the dual boot, I didn't give detailed instructions on the "how to" of each. Hopefully I told you enough for an informed decision of which way you want to do it and basics of what you need to accomplish.

While I was typing all that, mrrangerman gave you that booting tips link (maybe you didn't notice). That page tells you the detailed "how to" for most or all of the individual steps of each of the three different plans I tried to describe.