RedHat and WinXP Dual Boot
 

Okay, I've dual booted thousands of systems before but this is throwing me off, maybe it's GRUB, but any help would be appreciated:

I've been running RedHat exclusively on this system for about two years now. Recently formatted and installed 7.3. It was working wonderfully for a few weeks. It's installed on a 9.1GB SCSIU2W drive (the only hard drive in the system at that point).

Decided to throw WinXP on a spare 40GB IDE drive I had lying around. So I install the 40GB drive, boot win98 from a floppy, fdisk it, format it, copy the WinXP install to it, start the XP install til it writes a boot sector, and reboot.

As usual, GRUB loads, I boot linux, add an entry for WinXP in grub.conf:

root (hd1,0)
makeactive
chainloader +1

Reboot. GRUB has the new entry. I hit enter, and GRUB detects the FAT32 partition, boots the command list, and hangs. No caps lock, no ctrl-alt-delete, just hangs completely.

However, if I tell the BIOS to boot from IDE first, WinXP boots right up. If I tell it to boot SCSI first, it will boot GRUB.

I could be a pansy and use MS' boot loader, but I hate that. Plus it's inconvenient to have two boot menus during boot (MS and then GRUB if I want Linux). So what am I doing wrong? I just want GRUB on the MBR of the SCSI disk to boot both RedHat and WinXP.

Any help would be appreciated.

-P

What I did was have WinXP on FIRST. Then using Parition Magic 7, created a new partition (unformated no table) and stuck Mandrake Linux on that. Now, Mandrake gives me the LILO screen everytime I start up, allowing me to choose.

Yes, I have done it both ways in the past, with either OS already on a disk on the machine. I never had a problem adding Windows to LILO, but this is my first attempt at GRUB and apparently it's a lot more finicky. Any suggestions? I really don't feel like moving all the data around the drives again so I can format and reinstall.

Have u tried loading GRUB on the HD with XP?

Okay... Let this be a lesson to us all... RTFM. No, really, RTFM -- especially if Howtos and FAQs fail.

In the GNU manual there's a little reference to a command called "map," in which they document that Microsoft OSes don't like to boot unless they think they're the first drive in the system. So I just added:

map (hd0) (hd1)
map (hd1) (hd0)
root (hd1,0)
makeactive
chainloader +1

and voila! XP boots. Go figure.