I successfully installed mandrake 10.0 on a blank hard drive that I put in my machine which is a dell dimension 4500, but the only way to boot an OS is to disconnect the other hard drive, if I want to boot mandrake I must disconnect the XP hard drive and vice versa. how can I dual boot as easy as possible, this is my first time using linux and i have no clue what to do. I read a few posts about changing the boot loader and that seems to be the easiest way to go but I'm not totally sure how to do that, I don't want to delete any data on either disk if possible.

Isn't there an entry in lilo(or grub) for it.

ok, let me get this straight, if you have both hdd in the computer Win XP boots, or do you get the Lilo screen?

Are you sure you set up the masters/slaves the right way (just checking... )? You should be able to use the grub boot loader with no problem... Is your second HDD detected by the BIOS? If not, the problem is in the BIOS or the hardware. You should check wether the BIOS auto-detects your hard-drives....

If it does, boot from the MDK10.0 CD (or floppy if the CD isn't bootable), press F1 at the first screen and type rescue. You should see a menu on a blue screen (this reminds me of something, but I can't put my finger on it... ). You should be able to boot your installed system from the menu (or at least this is what I remember). If not, choose "reinstall boot loader", "Mount all partitions under /mnt" and then "Go to console"

Type "cd /mnt" to get to your partitions and then "ls" to display the contents of the mnt directory, hopefully listing both the windows and your linux partition. If from ls you see dirs like "bin" "dev" "etc" "boot", that means it mounted your linux root partitions in "mnt". You should have another "mnt" directory here so type "cd mnt" and "ls". As you are using MDK10.0, you should see directories called win_c, win_d, a.s.o. CD to one of the directories ("cd win_c") and list the directory using "ls". If you see all your files, everything is in place, all you need to do is configure your bootloader.

Because you reinstalled your boot loader, you should reboot from the hard-drive (usually the one where you installed linux) and see if the lilo screen shows up (a little colorfull menu with your OSes). If it does, try to boot each system.

Plus, you should give a little more detail about your BIOS config...

If I have both hard drives in win XP is the only one that boots, I checked the bios and it detected both drives, I think they are both set to cable slect.
I read somewhere that you can put the linux.bin file on the C: drive and add it to the windows boot.ini but when I tried to put linux.bin on a floppy I got some other file. is there a different linux boot file I can put on the C: drive? this seems to be the easiest way, from what i have heard using lilo erases the windows MBR.

install lilo or grub to the mbr, and configure it to dual boot.


you can boot linux with it on the slave using boot floppy or install cd rescue mode

I thought that with a two hard drive set up., it is important to ensure that that one hd has the jumper set as master, the Win XP in this case, and the other hd jumper set as slave.

I didn't think the dual boot works with Cable select jumper position?

I have a similar set-up to the one you describe, with WinXP on my first hard disk and mandrake on my 2nd. Were both hard disks in when you installed Mandrake? It set things up to dual boot automatically for me using Lilo on the MBR.

iv just set up a computer like that this week.
most of what needs to be said has been said above.

i had to install windows first then mandrake 10 so that the mandrake install could re-make the boot sector. windows didnt seem to like being installed on anything but the first partition of the master on ide1 and would over write anything on the mbr. kinda annoying but ya....

otherwise make sure the hard disks are all setup right master-slave etc.

Cable select may work if the bios supports it correctly. It's designed to make production line assembly faster. You can easily setup the disks for master / slave and eliminate related problems.

The bootloader goes on the primary master or the disk booted by the bios. It can take care of the loading of the os if you tell it where the os is.