Here's the situation: I installed Windows XP and Red Hat 9 on two seperate Hard Disks, both set as Master, using a HD swapper so that only one was ever plugged in at once, however, the swappers were causing heat problems with the HDs.

So the new plan is the basic dual-boot Windows XP on one Redhat on the other, how do I set this up? Here's what I did: Using one ribbon cable plugged the two HDDs into one slot, Windows XP was slave, Redhat master, other ribbon cable went to the DVD drive (slave of course). Everything configured fine, both hard disks were being recognized, but GRUB didn't have Windows. I booted from the Redhat install CD, and told it to reconfigure GRUB, it seemed to work fine, it recognized "DOS" on the second HDD, and I installed a few packages I wanted. But at the end it told me, "No kernel packages were installed/upgraded, the GRUB config wasn't changed" and GRUB booted with just Redhat.

I'm going to try it with the Windows HD as Master and Linux as slave, I'll post if that works, .

Tried Windows - Master, Redhat - Slave. Booted straight to Windows, next thought is to boot from the Linux CD again and install the MBR on the Windows HD, but since Windows contains valuable stress relieving games, that's going to have to wait.

Any input would be welcome, .

I set both my HDs to Cable select then put my Linux HD on the middle connector of the ATA cable. Then, when I installed Red Hat 9, it auto detected dos and created a grub thing for it, but I stupidly attempted to create a windows booter thing to which didn't work, and all along, 'booting to Dos' actually started up windows . This might work for you. not sure though. I have a dell 8200, and Dells have odd hardware installations.

I recently installed Red Hat in a secondary HD, as you. Here is what I did:

Installation:

1. I disconnected the original HD (Master) with Windows XP from the cable and connected the new HD (Slave) in the same IDE cable. I did this because I did not want to mess up with the XP original installation. I also, configured my BIOS booting sequence to the CDROM unit (1st option) and the secondary HD as 2nd option;

2. Installed Red Hat in the Slave IDE. Although I have the master HD disconnected, the installation went without any error;

3. Reconnected the master HD into the IDE and confirmed that everything was fine. At this point, I had to use the BIOS setup every time I wanted to change the OS.

I thought I could live with this, but it was very annoying to enter BIOS when changing OS, so I did some searches in this forum and I found a very easy solution. If you installed GRUB, there is a configuration file where you can add other booting options. Here is what I did:

1. Configured BIOS setup to use the secondary IDE (SLAVE) the the first boot option;

2. I added the following lines at the end of /boot/grub/grub.conf:

title Windows XP
map (hd0) (hd1)
map (hd1) (hd0)
rootnoverify (hd1,0)
chainloader +1
makeactive

The configuration above will make GRUB prompt you to select Red Hat or Windows XP (default) when booting. I think the XP boot and shutdown became slower, but it is way much better than having to call BIOS setup.

I hope this helps.

RHo68

I'm sure that's going to work, , even though I haven't tried it yet. I do have a question though, what are these lines for?

map (hd0) (hd1)
map (hd1) (hd0)

Also, what's the diference between root and rootnoverify?

Last thing, with this setup the Windows HD is still considered hd1?

Worked great! Thanks much.

Ok, new problem, on startup, I'm getting this message:

Activating swap partitions: /dev/hda3 swapon: No such device [FAILED]

Which is odd, since this seems to be the Windows HDD... This is what my partition check says:

hda: hda1
hdb: hdb1 hdb2 hdb3

This didn't seem to cause any problems until I tried to install some packages by booting from the Redhat CD. Since I just installed something off that CD yesterday, I assume I did something bad since then.

The message was appeared before I changed the grub.conf file.

One last thing, on bootup, I get this long series of messages:

hdb: dma_intr: status=0x51 {DriveReady SeekCompleteError }
hdb: dma_intr: error=0x84 {DriveStatusError BadCRC }

Does that about a dozen times, then says,

ide0: resest success

and moves on.

admanb,

Sorry for the late reply. I am glad this worked for you, too.

Following your questions, as far as I remember, the map commands will switch the HDD, in the way that Windows XP will recognize the right disks. I was trying to find the original message that I copied the instructions, but I could not find it. Also, I am not sure what "rootnoverify" means. To be honest, I only followed the instructions on how to configure, but I did not pay much attention to the explanations of the commands. The only thing I can tell you for sure is that Linux will recognize the the master drive as hda (Windows) and the secondary for the linux itself (hdb).

Sorry for not being able to answer your questions in details, but I am also a newbie.

Best regards,

Rho68

i'm going to try that dual boot thing w/two hard drives on my computer... will update to let know if all goes well.

i, too, have the same setup: 2 hd's, winxp as master and RH9 as slave. except in my case, i use a boot floppy for rh9. lately i have been thinking about putting my win drive into LILO so i can stop using the floppy, since that has not been reading good lately.

i will let you know if i succeed.

i have suceeded!!! this really works!


title Windows XP
map (hd0) (hd1)
map (hd1) (hd0)
rootnoverify (hd1,0)
chainloader +1
makeactive


where it says windows XP, u can make it SaY WiNdOwS Xp professional, home edition, or u can put anything! i put "windoze that doesnt work XP"

Try it!

~Brandon~

I know that your posts are from some time ago but I just want to tell you I LOVE YOU!!!! for moths I didn't get this to work en I've seen a lot of menu.lst in the mean time, I quess that there aren't a lot of people booting windows on hda from hdb.
THNX MAN!!

Just to verify: this will NOT screw up the Windows setup, right? i.e., I 'm not messing up the Windows bootloader by adding these lines. I want to do this, but I want to make sure that worse case, I can change boot order to go to master (Windows install) and it will work fine.

No, this won't mess up your XP Bootloader. You are not changing the bootloader or anything, you're just changing it's configuration. So it will be fine.

I had this exact problem for ages (I just pulled out the power to my linux drive before I turned on the computer if i wanted to boot windows). The meaning of these lines are:
Just the name to display on the GRUB menu
This just swaps around the drives - windoze needs to boot from the primary drive, not the slave, so this tricks windoze into thinking that it is booting from the primary.
Set the root device *but don't mount it*
chainload the bootloader in the first block of the root device (now (hd1,0) as set above)
set the root device to the active partition on the disk (I'm not sure why this is needed actually. But hey, it works

For more info on GRUB see http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual/grub.html

Nice descriptions!

P.S. This addition works like a charm for me! I put the XP first in the list to make it default because it's still my family's main setup. Linux is still for the geek - me!