Hi Everyone,
I am quite new to Linux and wish to have a dual boot system with Linux (Red Hat Advanced Server) and Windows Xp. I have 2 hard disks installed. The master disk (hda) has Windows XP installed on it and I wish to install RedHat AS on the slave (hdb).

During the installation od Red Hat AS, the Windows boot partition is not picked by Linux. I chose to install GRUB on the first sector of the /boot partition, when i rebooted after installation, the system went straight to Windows.

So i did a re-installation (i'm still a newbie), this time installing GRUB on the MBR. After installation was complete, the Windows Partition was not picked up. I tried adding the following line to the grub.conf file:
title Windows XP
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
chainloader +1

When I select Windows XP from the GRUB screen I get the following error:
Error 13: Invalid or unsupported executable format.

So to get windows back, i went to XP recovery concole and used the FIXMBR command. Now I can access Windows but have lost Linux.

Can anyone guide me on how to have a dual bootable system with Windows and Linux on separate hard disks? I would not like to re-install the Windows system on the master drive, is there a way?

Dual booting works fine if i try to install both systems on a single disk (tried on another machine).

Your help would be much appreciated.
Thanks in advance

No reason to re-install any OS.........

Your booting into Windows may be to the wrong partition, many systems now have a small recovery partition at the begining of the hard drive and Windows is really on hda2 or hd0,1 (for grub). So you might want to check this first, after booting into Linux use the command 'fdisk -l hda' minus the single quotemarks to check.

If you want to use the Windows bootloader instead after using the fixmbr command and installing grub on the secondary (hdb) hard drive.

Boot into Linux (first) and log on as root from the console or xterm session do something like;

/sbin/grub-install --recheck /dev/hdb (*)
dd if=/dev/hdb of=/bootsect.lnx bs=512 count=1

Save the file to a floppy or a 'shared FAT32/VFAT' partition if available. When done boot into Windows (after using fixmbr) and copy this file to the root of the Windows "C:" drive.

Change the attributes of the boot.ini (so you can edit the file) and add a line like; c:\bootsect.lnx="Linux"

When done save and restore the attributes of the boot.ini file.

* You might want to do this (as a test) first to hda, maybe this will fix the problem.