GRUB and two XP's
 

Yello, here's what I've done and what I intended: I have XP on an IDE drive and another XP on another IDE drive using an IDE-SATA adapter so I have an IDE free for my DVD drive, what with only having 2 IDE slots on my new PC. I have 2 because one is for my Mother and I don't want her even having a possibility of ruining anything of mine.

So I installed the second XP with the first one unplugged so that it wouldn't call it D: or something and mess things up. I can boot into both fine by changing the BIOS boot order, but I wanted to make it easy for my mum, so I put grub for windows on her drive and I'm trying to make it so if nothing is touched it boots into her's. This works fine, but when I select grub from the XP bootloader I cant get my XP to boot. I'm pretty sure I dont have to swap map the drives since they're both bootable as is, and rootnoverify(hdx,0) doesnt do anything no matter what I put in place of x. It always just returns to the XP boot loader on mums drive. There are 3 drives in right now, 0 is mums, 1 is a data drive and 2 is mine.

my current menu.lst is:

title Windows
rootnoverify (hd2,0)
makeactive
chainloader +1

I tried it with swapping hd0 and hd2 and all combinations with the rootnoverify command just in case, but then it complains about missing NTLDR.

I'm intending to install another XP for audio recording on a SATA drive partitioned in half with a Debian install which I dont foresee any problems with if I can sort this out. Also, I am aware I could just go and buy SATA drives, which I may do, but I'd like to know why this has gone wrong. Any ideas? I havent had much experience with this kind of thing so I imagine it's some small thing I just wasnt aware of.

Grub doesn't boot windows it chainloads, looks for the windows bootloader and the windows bootloader is then responsible for booting the different systems. Here's a microsoft link about dual-booting windows w/xp although not two instances of xp, might help:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/306559

microsoft page on modifying boot.ini

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/289022

You will need to modify the boot.ini file.
Why don't you just create two users with the administrator and passwords?

The user Saikee on this board has many links to how to use grub for various situations in his sig.
So, I'd suggest you do a search for any post by him, and then follow his links.

tredegar is right, read this, I know it is more than you want to do but does explain about running multiple windows on different hds. If you still have questions come back and ask or at least let us know if you got it fixed.

http://www.justlinux.com/forum/showt...hreadid=147959