Dual Booting With 2 Hard Drives
 

So far I have seen guides explaining dual booting but they only explain having both OSes on the same hd. Right now I have one hd with SuSE 10 and another with Windows XP (I just keep Windows for games). I was wondering if there's anyway to dual boot without any reformating at all. I would guess that suse would be primary and windows secondary but that's about it. Any help would be appriciated.

Have you got both OS's installed on two HD's now? If yes, all you need to do is install a boot loader. Either Lilo or Grub will work.

As far as I know XP needs to be on the primary drive, Linux can be on either.

The only difference between a one drive and two (or more) drive install is the drive and partition information in the boot loader. I have two drives, one W98 system on the primary drive, Mdk 9.2 on the first drive, and I put Mdk 10.1 on the second drive. I'm using Lilo and it works fine.

Thank you for the quick reply. I will try this out right away.

Ok well my setup is like that already. I have winxp hd as my master and linux hd as my slave. I'm pretty sure GRUB is installed on my Linux hd so would all I need to do is edit the boot.ini file in Windows? Alot of the tutorials I've found on the web don't explain this too well. Both OSes have been installed for me already.

In theory the answer is to install the Linux disk as the primary master and Windows as the primary slave, then use the map-drive option in either Lilo or GRUB to boot the pre-installed Windows.
The caveats are: having anything in the MBR (of the Windows drive) (??) can cause Windows to go into the "cannot find NTLDR" mode, sometimes; although Windows was happy as a slave with map-drive it oddly has never worked for me since a "Windows update" which of course involved nothing to do with the MBR. Personally I suspect M$ monkey business on both accounts. They love to play dumb while making anything they dislike incompatable with their software.
So it is possible it will give you trouble in any case. Deal with the "NTLDR" issue if you attempt to have Windows as the primary but install a bootloader, or possibly have to switch drives if you attemp to use map-drive with Windows as the slave and it does not work.
Good Luck.

I'm going to be having the same problems pretty soon....Right now i have a 160 Gig harddrive which has windows xp sp2 on it, and on a 40 gig harddrive i'm going to install SuSE 10.0. So when i put the SusE 10.0 CD in there, i can't just pick what drive I want to install the Linux OS on? Won't it automatically configure everythiung with a boot loader or do i have to manually install a boot loader after i sintall SuSE on the 2nd harddrive which will be the slave?

From the research I have done it seems what I will have to do for my setup would be to install grub on my /boot sector. Then change the grub.conf in Linux to add the Windows entry. Then make a copy of the Linux boot sector and place in on the Windows drive in C:\. After that I should boot into Windows and edit the boot.ini file to add the Linux option. Then reboot and it should work. The site that I got this from was http://www.geocities.com/epark/linux...w2k-HOWTO.html. http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual/grub.html helps a bit too.

I've only ran into a few problems. One, it seems like grub wasn't installed on my computer despite running yum install grub. I can read through man grub but I can't use the utility grub-install and I can't find a directory where grub is located. I'm sure there is more then meets the eye.

I'm thinking of just doing a reinstall on my main hard drive which is a serial ata 120g. Half of it would be Linux so I can use Linux with the benefit of serial ata and the other half with windows so I can run games, leaving the second hard drive to be my back up/testing distro hard drive.

Sorry I couldn't help more.