Just got Slackware 10.2 up and running on a spare hard drive I physically swapped into my system for the Windows hard drive. Now I'd like a dual boot system with my existing Windows XP hard drive added in.

Right now, with both hard drives on the same IDE controller, the one set to master is the one whose OS boots up. I think I know how I'd have set this up if I were smart enough to think of this from the beginning, but I wasn't, and now I'm stuck.

How do I combine two single boot hard drives into a dual boot/dual hard drive system after having Slackware already fully installed? Not sure if this matters, but I am running a Dell Optiplex P3 450 mHz from about 1998. Doesn't have great bios options, or maybe I could fake it from there.

Seems like editing the lilo file should do the trick, but I feel lucky that I even got this thing running, and I'd hate to mess it up, so hopefully someone can help. Thanks.

Hi

I'd suggest letting windows be the master (it's always happier if so).

Thereafter you have to boot into linux using your slack CD and an option like this on the boot prompt.

Where you replace bare.i with the kernel you used (propably bare.i). /dev/hdb1 is the first partition on the second drive (slave) change the "1" to your correct root partition.

After you've booted into your slack install you can try using liloconfig or edit lilo.conf by hand. If you need help with this post your /etc/lilo.conf

Kind regards

Worked like a charm. Thanks. I have the XP boot on hda1 and Linux boot on hdb1.

I do get the following message when booting off the CD per your instructions:

*** ERROR: Root partition has already been mounted read-write. Cannot check! ***

Then there is some stuff about how to fix the problem using 'rdev' or booting from a boot disk with the 'ro' flag, plus adding a 'read-only' flag to the lilo.conf file.

I also realized my lilo.conf file has XP on hdb1 and Linux on hda1, but when I switched it around to the correct settings, I got an error message when I lilo-ed it.

One funny thing, when I typed startx, I got a quick ghost image of the XP shutting down image.

Here is my lilo.conf file without all the comments:


BTW, I found this guide for setting up a dual boot, but I think I'll take a breather for a couple of days before I tackle it:

http://www.highlandsun.com/hyc/linuxboot.html