Linux/Windows dual boot on 2 IDE drives
 

Is it possible to have my primary master drive as Red Hat Linux 7.2 and my primary slave drive as Windows 2000?

if you have a bios that allows you to select which drive it boots from, you could do it this way. just select 0 for redhat, and 1 for windows. if your bios doesnt allow this you would have to set whichever drive you wanted to boot from to master. as far as i know.

a cool way of doing it would be using a couple of removable drive bays. and using cable select on the hard drives. just swap the drives around and it will boot off the one on the end of the cable.

or just set em both to master and use one at a time. thats what i used to do before i scrounged up enough cash for a seperate linux box

But can I use grub on the primary master to boot Windows 2000 on the primary slave?

Yes, Grub or LILO will do that. Just go into its configuration options and select the drive (probably hdb in your case) and the partition (again probably 1). It should then look like this "hdb1"

I thought that Windows 2000 could only boot if it "owned" the Master Boot Record of the Primary Master hard drive.

Not sure what you mean by owned. If you mean using its own boot manager then no.

All the Windows variants will boot with another boot manager, but some require they are one the first, primary partition of a drive. M$ thing.

I'm very much a newbie (installed onto HDD yesterday)
and by sheer luck (and deductive reasoning) I found a Raid system works nicely for this.

I have Linux on an 8 gig (parititioned of course) and windows on a 60 gig. As the PC boots I enter ctrl + h to get into the raid config area and simply select the disk I wish to boot from.

:newbie: but learning

Yes - but make sure you install Red Hat after Win2k - install either LILO or GRUB to the MBR (boot sector of 1st hard drive)

OK I messed up - I installed Mandrake 8.2 on the additional hard drive, didn't want to mess up windows until I was more familar with linux. Well went home (posted this at work) and tried to boot up to windows (changing the boot disk in the Raid area) and I was presented with nothing more than a LI and a space at this point. I thought installing Linux to the additional hard drive would not have messed with my windows HD - what happened? The only way I could then boot into windows was to run fdisk /mbr to restore the windows master boot? I now can only bring up linux from a boot floppy (slowwwwwwww) how can I boot linux from my HD and not screw up windows (others using this PC don't want linux - I haven't converted them yet :P )

any help to a ultra newbie would be appreciated

it sounds like you didn't install lilo properly, and so it couldn't boot it. Try installing lilo into the master boot record again, with everything laid out real nice. Then boot from it, and see what you get.

sounds easy enough - however I did not want to mess with the windows HD just yet - how do I reinstall lilo to boot linux or windows (until I am more familiar with linux) without causing problems for my windows HD?

Again - with a typical dual boot you'd just use LILO or GRUB and install either to the MBR - its up to you whether you see it as too risky in terms of the other users - however - in general - to re-install LILO as root from a shell type :

/sbin/lilo

LILO will then be re-installed to whatever is specified in the

boot=

directive - at the top of your lilo.conf file

If you want LILO to the MBR youd make sure it says

boot=/dev/hda

Again - its up to you if you think its going to mess things up or annoy the other users on your system

Is it possible to have the lilo not mess with the mbr of the windows HD and only edit the mbr of the linux HD and allow my Raid setup to determine the system to run?

I can set the boot disk in this area - ie set disk 1 as boot or disk 2 as boot.

Is this possible or will I need to only use lilo. I'm the only linux user on the system with linux on hard drive #2. I do not want other users (3 possible) to need to edit or configure anything on the windows disk (hd #1) or raid settings.

Thanks for the help thus far.

LILO cannot boot windows2000. Grub can tho
i had this mess a while back, i messed up the boot loader to win2k so bad i had to format the drive and reinstall win2k

i have it set as such

HD0 := win2k
HD1 :=Gentoo Linux
install win2k on the primary master(HD0)
install linux on the secondary master drive(HD1)
install grub on the mbr of HD0


set an entry in your grub.conf file that looks like this:

when grub boots, you can load whatever OS you want.

Cheers!

i have a question related to the last answer
could i partioition my lin hd and add a line or2 to grub to boot debian which i am looking 2 use