Not too long ago I had Windows XP Home and Ubuntu 9.10 installed .. dualboot .. with the one HD partitioned for XP and Ubuntu. Just recently, my computer had a major, catastrophic failure. Both HD's crashed. How or why, I don't know. And to make things even more frustrating .. all my data, such as emails, software keys, licenses, serial numbers, passwords, etc., were lost! I have since gotten a new 80g sata HD with XP installed right now. I have noticed that Ubuntu 10.x (whatever) is soon to be released - April 29th. So I intend to wait until the new version of Ubuntu is released before I install Ubuntu. I am still waiting for the replacement HD for my second HD since it was still under warranty. Should be arriving in the next 2-3 weeks (I hope). It will be another 80g (I think) and possibly a sata drive. The bad drive being replaced was an IDE. So, I don't know if the second will be IDE or sata. Anyway, I want to install Ubuntu on the second HD apart, and separate from, the XP HD. I need complete, concise information on how to exactly set-up the two OSs such that when the computer is started, or rebooted, the GRUB menu will open and allow me to select which OS to start. I really don't want to partition the HDs for OS install. My apologies for the lengthy thread. And ... thanks.

Have a few usb/external drives the size of each internal drive.
An old knoppix 5.x will have testdisk on it.
Boot the knoppix cd.
You'll need to attach the drives after the boot process is complete.
Open the terminal by clicking the icon at the bottom.
Also look for the icon on the desktop.
You want to open testdisk with
Choose the first disk to save the files, the file types, and save to abn external drive. Do the same with the second.
You'll get a lot of trash but you should find about 50 to 65% of the files you are missing.


An easier way is to mount from knoppix and copy the files to a usb drive.

So that seems to answer the recovery question

As for installing Ubuntu onto second drive, it could not be easier.
Simply follow the prompts until you get to the select drive section and then simply select
the second drive and say to use all of it and your away.

As for grub, I have had hit and miss here as to whether or not the installation picks up the
windows install (sometimes yes sometimes no ).
Anyhow, not a biggy, you just need to edit either /boot/grub/menu.lst or /boot/grub/grub.cfg.

Now the second I am not 100% on but the first you can just add:

Now the (hd0,0) means, first partition of first disk (which may be /dev/hda for example)

I am sure if you google for grub2 you will get the entry for grub.cfg

good luck

I would recommend switching the XP drive to make it the second drive and then install Ubuntu on what would then be the first drive. This is because the BIOS should attempt to boot whichever bootable drive it finds first. GRUB, the bootloader for Ubuntu, can boot both. That way, you don't have to touch your XP drive.

You can find help online to configure GRUB to boot Windows. You might even be lucky enough that Ubuntu configures it as dual boot for you. You might want something like the following.

Also, you may look at this post: http://www.linuxquestions.org/linux/...d_HD_with_Grub

I would suggest you install Ubuntu on the hard drive you want, then specify in your motherboards BIOS to explicitly boot from that hard drive.
Then, in the case of Grub 2, if you run os-prober and update-grub as root it should detect everything automoatically and configure it accordingly in grub.cfg.

Thanks to all that responded. And, I didn't wish to start a war of who's right. So, at any rate, for now, I will just wait until I get my replacement HD and then download the new version of Ubuntu when it gets
released.

No arguments ... just different takes

Hope it all works, don't forget to mark as SOLVED (once you copy the above stuff down of course)