Hi, (first of all, excuse my bad english) i want to know if i can install xp on an old 20 gb ide drive and ubuntu on a partitioned 250gb sata drive. What does the grub do in that situation? does it detect both drives or only the one i have first in my bios? this is what i have tried:

i plugged the ide drive on the ide 1 port, a dvd writer on the ide 2 port, and the sata drive on the sata 1 port. then i configured the bios, it boots the dvd first, then the sata drive (there isn't a third option available and i can't boot one drive first then the other, i don't know why) then i installed ubuntu 7.04 on the second partition of the sata drive (the first was the swap partition) with the live cd, restarted and got the error 22 from grub 1.5. then i erased everything and installed in the first sata partition ubuntu 7.04 and left the second sata partition for swap, restarted and got error 15 from grub.

then i erased everything again, and configured the bios to boot first the dvd, then the ide drive, then i installed xp and everything is working fine now. now how should i proceed with the ubuntu installation?¿ should i leave the bios configuration like it is and install ubuntu on the sata drive? where does the grub program install, on the ide or on the sata drive? ¿can i use another boot loader than doesn't have conflicts with using 2 physical drives? please don't give me solutions by using floppy drive because i haven't got one.

Yeah you did it correctly the 2nd time, its much easier installing windows first, then linux.

Just install ubuntu on the other harddrive, I would have that be the first boot device, and install grub on the mbr of the same drive. It should be very straight forward and everything should be setup automatically.

right, so i changed the boot order, first the dvdwriter, then the sata drive and installed ubuntu 7.04 on the first sata partition. i restarted and got error 22 again. after a lot of ¡"$·%&·"$"! i changed the boot order, first the dvdwriter, then the ide drive. grub started (i thought it was installed on my sata drive ¿???) and it worked! it shows windows xp from my ide drive and ubuntu from my sata drive. why is this? where is the grub installed?

Hi, after much reinstalling, my question is this: how do i choose what master boot record (the SATA drive or the IDE drive) is overwritten when i install ubuntu, looks like the 7.04 live cd install won't let me make the choice, it just writes grub to the IDE drive MBR

I have a near identical setup. Here's what I did.

1.) Go into your BIOS, make the IDE drive the second boot device behind your DVD writer.
2.) Install Windows on that IDE drive
(Windows writes the MBR to the IDE drive)
3.) Go into your BIOS and make the SATA drive the second boot device behind your DVD writer.
4.) Install Ubuntu on that SATA drive.
5.) When GRUB asks what drive to save to tell it /dev/sda.

/dev/sda means it will store it on the boot sector of the SATA drive. If you look at your GRUB file it might say hd0, all that means is the 'first boot device'.... remember the SATA drive was changed to first boot device in your BIOS.

problem solved, ubuntu didn't ask where to install grub... but debian did, so i installed on /dev/sda asjuvestar 15 said. then unplugged the ide drive and installed ubuntu in another sata partition, plugged the ide drive back and now all three OS's work, thanks for the help