For what it's worth...

In discussing tis question on a newsgroup I frequent, the probable cause of this is that in installing and setting up a new HD, I simply used Seagate's wizard to set up and transfer the Windows XP C-drive from teh old HD to the new HD. I wanted to first get Windows up and running as the boot on the new drive, so selected to boot from teh new drive. Once I had all working there, I went in and cleared the partitions on the old drive and installed Kubuntu on it, also electing to create a separate /home partition. Apparently, what I inadvertently did was in installing Kubuntu on the old drive, grub was installed there, but I had forced booting from the MBR on the new drive. With little or no experience, I didn't realize that I was creating a problem, and that the new drive is the wecondary drive, and th e old one is still the primary.

I've gone into BIOS to see if I could elect booting from the secondary (old HD) instead, but don't seem to be able to do that - or at least, don't know how.

I have confirmed that the installation is otherwise OK by using F12 at boot to manually select the old drive as the boot drive. I am working in Firefox, which I installed on the Kubuntu inmstallation after booting into Kubuntu in that way.

I guess all of that is just FYI since it appears that there are various problems which may be surmountable by reinstalling GRUB and asking it to be installed on the new HD. I'm not sure when I'll feel comfortable enough to try to do that...hopefully in the next few days after doing a bit more reading.

For now, it's F12 when I want to gt into Kubuntu.

Thanks!
Optiker

Information of that sort is always good to share with us. Oftentimes we're sitting here reading, and wonder to ourselves (or out loud in my case), "how in the hell did they get that to happen?"

My generic 2 disk install would work like this -

1st disk (in the boot sequence, size is unimportant) windows, with win bootloader
2nd disk linux, with as many partitions as desired, 2 -> 63

When the linux gets installed, I put grub in the boot partition. but also let it overwrite the windows bootloader on the 1st drive. There are tons of equally good ways (floppy loader disks, using bios to swap disk order, manually switching the plugs on the drives, etc) of changing the disks around, that is just what has worked for me. I have never had a problem with grub detecting the win install, and it always boots to it easily.

I should advance however, that I only have windows on my work laptop, as I have completely stopped using it years ago, and do not miss it. My work laptop is an IBM/lenovo T42 thinkpad. It came with a 36 Gb IDE drive, and I had no problem shrinking the base winXP install to 8 Gb, and giving all the rest of the space to Debian Sid. In the past I did desktop dual booting, but don't anymore, so my firsthand data can be considered dated, but I see postings on it all the time here in Newbie and elsewhere on LQ, and it seems to stay consistent.

Peace,
JimBass

That's what my intention was, but I guess I wasn't experienced enough to get it right

I tried the BIOS thing, which seemed like a logical, quick and easy solution, and seemed consistent with the symptoms. But, it offers three boot devices (floppy, CD, the C-drive) and I didn't see a way that I understood to replace the C-drive on the new HD (which is the secondary drive) with the old HD (which is the primary) and didn't know how to go about making the old HD primary - or even if that was a good idea.

So, between not knowing enough and being paranoid about doing something that loses the whole system - wouldn't be the first time - I've been very slow to try much of anything I don't understand.

The other place I'm discussing this is grc.techtalk.linux. One respondent asked for my menu.list and fstab, which can be found here...


menu.list at http://tinyurl.com/2do5fl

fstab at http://tinyurl.com/2fv3m7

After looking at them, he commented back that they were a mess, including contradictory, and he invited others to offer repair suggestions as it was beyong his expertise to do so. I really appreciated his comments...nothing like a direct, candid answer. F12 to get the selection list of boot devices works, even if somewhat inconvenient. Life is full of messy situations for which there aren't clean solutions, just inconvenient but adequate ones. Maybe that will have to do. I'm posting this here because as you pointed out, more information can be useful, but, I also don't expect any easy silver bullets.

Thanks!
Optiker

There certainly are some very strange things in there. Nothing that makes this impossible, but very strange nonetheless. First, it would have been nice to know that the new drive is SATA and the old is an IDE. That doesn't change things, but I was picturing 2 IDE drives. Seeing now that you have two entirely different drive architectures makes a bit more sense.

I do see what the chatlist guys said about the fstab being ugly. The order of it makes no sense. See below ->
I don't know why it mounted the SATA/win drives to media. That is another thing that is fine, just odd. I would think most of the time the extra drive would get mounted to subdivisions of /mnt rather than /media, but no blood no foul in that case.

Still, it is very easy to simply install grub, and to get everything booting easily, from the grub screen.

First things first - since you have an IDE drive and SATA drives. it will come down to your BIOS. You need to poke around in there and tell me some things. If you can set your boot order in the BIOS, it will be possible to boot without overwriting the windows bootloader at all, which you would probably find desirable. If you can set the boot device order in BIOS to be: then we'll be very well set. What we can do in that case is reinstall grub to the IDE harddrive, and also write it to the MBR of the IDE drive that is already linux. We don't need to split it and put the MBR in the windows drive, unless you can't do it through the BIOS.

The benefits of doing it this way are that should you ever have the linux drive fail (hardware failure) or if you simply take it out, windows will still boot, as its bootloader will still exist on the SATA drive, which will be the next place the BIOS will look to boot if the IDE drive is not there.

Let's go with that method, as it is the cleanest. Here's how: (all through the terminal)
You'll want grub to install over itself, and when it asks about the MBR. make sure it is put on /dev/hda, and not on /dev/sda. It will probably make an almost identical /boot/grub/menu.list You may need to copy parts of the menu.list.orig copy that we just made into the new one, but grub also might see things perfectly.

So check BIOS first, if you can use the boot order I gave you, then do the grub reinstall. I stuck in my recliner with a broken right heel, so I'll be around all day to help if you hit snags.

Peace,
JimBass

Jim...In my BIOS, the boot order section includes floppy, CD and the SATA drive. I don't see a way to drop the floppy and replace it with the IDE. Suggestions? Sorry...not very knowledgable in that area.

I suspect the stuff in fstab is out of order as the result of my manually creating partitions when I really didn't know a lot about what I was doing!

Thanks!
Optiker

Yeah man, as far as the BIOS goes, it has to have an entry for the IDE drive, as it would be necessary if you didn't have a SATA. It doesn't matter what you get rid of, though it certainly does make sense to do away with a floppy. Just play with the BIOS, and see if you can get to 1) CD, 2) IDE, 3) SATA.

If not, you can use GRUB to overwrite the MBR on the SATA, but there has to be a way to get onto the MBR for the IDE drive, and get that to boot before the SATA.

Peace,
JimBass