Hello y'all :-)

Third time poster, long-time listener. I love what y'all did with the place; exceptionally easy to use! :-)

I have an ASUS a8n-sli deluxe board.

I have 3 IDE hard drives installed

HDD1=20GB (Primary Master)
HDD2=10 GB (Primary Slave)
HDD3=10 GB (Secondary Slave)

HDD2+3 are RAID-0 with Windows XP installed on them
HDD1 has Fedora core 4 installed on it

I would like to dual boot

Due to the ability to change the boot order of HDDs in my BIOS, I am able to easily switch between the two OSs. (That's right, I have two master boot records :-)

I would prefer not to have to access the BIOS every time I would like to switch, and since my head spins when reading about getting GRUB to detect RAID-0, I have decided to setup the dual-boot config through boot.ini

Ummm..... any ideas how to do that?

I tried the generic "copy the first 512 bytes to the windows partition" and all I get is a "GRUB" on the screen and it simply hangs....

So, any ideas how to do this (through boot.ini OR grub)?

Thanks a bunch
Techno Hed (aka Bill-H8er)

I do not know MS boot.ini syntax. All I know is LILO or GRUB. I prefer GRUB. Either LILO or GRUB you will need to compile them with dmraid support or just compile dmraid utilities and then compile the bootloaders. After that, you need to look into re-mapping drives in order to boot into windows. Windows wants to be the first drive or else it will not boot.

In Linux type grub. Then type
root (hd<tab>
It should list the drives. Post the output, so we can select the right drive. Also post /boot/grub/menu.lst.

I did some searching and found
http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=58874

Thanks for the response :-)

Sorry, I just got home from work. Yesterday, I did a little searching and I found this:
http://www.geocities.com/lode_leroy/grubinstall/

Which surprisingly worked! :-) I now have a /boot directory on my windows NTFS partition (pretty cool:-)

But now I have a new problem; I can't seem to get the menu.lst file to work for some reason.
And so when I select "GRUB" from the windows boot list, it takes me to a grub command prompt (like what you told me to do anyways).

I did a little further research and found the following commands to boot up Fedora! (There was much hit-and-miss but when I got it I was so excited!):

root (hd1,0)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.11-1.1369_FC4 ro root=LABEL=/
initrd /initrd-2.6.11-1369.img
boot

But I would really prefer to not have to type so much in to get Fedora to work.... I tried pasting grun.conf into the boot directory, but no dice....

As for dmraid, I ran the search function and came up with this....

[Tech@localhost ~]# dmraid -s
*** Set
name : nvidia_bfiegbbd
size : 33028124
stride : 128
type : stripe
status : ok
subsets: 0
devs : 2
spares : 0
[root@localhost ~]#

Any more ideas?

Thanks
Techno Hed

Its is ok to install grub on the windows drive too, but you will run into trouble in the future. I suggest keeping the windows bootloader on the windows drive, so you can still boot to the windows drive from selecting it in the BIOS. Just use HDD1 to boot to either Linux or Windows.

All you need to do is add:
in /boot/grub/menu.lst. I do not have line that has boot. You can try comment it out by adding # as the beginning character on the same line as boot to find out if you do not need it.

BTW, I hope you are backing up your data because one wrong move can make the RAID array fail. I prefer people to use RAID 10 if they want improve throughput and takes up little processor resources.

Well, I solved the problem :-)

It turns out I needed to just SCRAP the boot.ini options; grub is SOOOO much easier to work with! :-)

...so it turns out that the initial link that Electro posted to the other forum http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=58874 (go figure!)was EXACTLY what my problem was....

So for anyone else looking for a solution, just enter this into the grub.conf file:

title Windows
root (hd1)
map (hd0) (hd1)
map (hd1) (hd0)
chainloader +1
savedefault
boot

Save yourself a headache- DON'T BOTHER WITH BOOT.INI!!!!

:-) Thanks again y'all

Techno Head

BUMP

I'm having the exact same problem except imusing a Promise software raid controller. I have dmraid set up and i can read my ntfs partition. I want to understand where to put that script and what exactly it is doing. Can someone explain to following lines and what they are doing so i know whether or not to modify anything for my specific set up:

aoberoi, the script should be placed in the /boot/grub/menu.lst under the title windows.

1) root (hd1,0) means it will use the second hard drive to boot up an OS that is on the primary partition.
2) map (hd0) (hd1) and map (hd1) (hd0) is remapping the drives. Some OS want their drive to be first. Others like Linux does not care if it comes first or last. These map commands is a little confusing at first, but the first drive is map as the second drive and the second drive is map as the first.
3) chainloader +1 uses the DOS module. This is not really needed, but I think it helps to boot up NTFS partitions or it may help to boot up software RAID arrays. I have not seen it on my setup while I had dual booting with Windows 98 and Linux.
4) savedefault well I do not know. I think it saves the remapping as the default so the second drive is the C: drive.
5) The boot command tells the boot loader to send the boot command for the OS on the second drive.

thanks electro.. that was very informative.

i just copied and pasted that script to my menu.lst file and it worked!

again thanks for your help