hello, ive got 2x20gb hard drives,both fujitsu, but one is a slightly older model, ive put winxp on the new, and slackware on the old, and ive put them both on the IDE cable, made one master and the other slave, and tried all the different ways, but heres the problem. i cant boot the windows HD drive when the linux HD is connected, it just hangs on the toshiba screen at the very beginning before the boot messages, and if i go into setup it says harddrives not detected. but if i unconnect the linux drive, the windows drive will boot up fine the IDE cable is an 80 core UDMA, although i dont think its the cable because like i say if the linux drive isnt connceted, it boots up fine, but add the linux HD to the cable, and the windows HD wont boot. any ideas why this could be happening?

Do both drives have the jumpers set as master or Cable Select ?

Set the jumper on one drive to Master
Set the jumper on the other drive to Slave

yep, ive done that farslayer, ive also tried all the different combinations

1) Make sure windows is on the master drive (avoids a few irritating problems ).
2) Make sure that the master drive doesn't have master with slave option, if it does use that instead of master.
3) Use fdisk to check and see that only one drive partition is set to bootable ( the windows drive preferably ).
4) Check the bios to make sure it has the correct drive set to master ( some special cables reverse the order for master and slave )

Hope these help with your setup.

Edit: Agree with farslayer on cable select. Strange problems arise using it.

thanks ,ill try that hern, just to give more information, these are the two drives in question,

Fujitsu MPF3204AT
http://193.128.183.41/home/v3__produ...c&pid=204&L=en

Fujitsu MPE3204AT
http://www.ciao.co.uk/Fujitsu_Deskto..._5_GB__5407762

Not sure which one is the old one, both are discontinued .

Set the one with windows as a master with slave present. (The drives both have the same jumper setting instructions)
Note: if your computer bios has the 2.1GB limitation you will need to set it accordingly.

The other drive should just be set as a slave. ( again not sure of your system so note the 2.1GB bios setting)

Extra: jumper setting instructions for each drive:

Fujitsu MPF3204AT
http://193.128.183.41/home/v3__produ...4&inf=cfg&wg=0

Fujitsu MPE3204AT
http://193.128.183.41/home/v3__produ...4&inf=cfg&wg=0

Good Luck

Another thing to check out is the BIOS hard drive boot order. Many BIOS's will have a hard drive boot priority based on the drive name--so no matter what combination of master/slave you try, it will always try to boot from the same hard drive first. It sounds like it's set to try and boot from the Linux drive first.

i followed the instructions about setting the windows HD to master/slave present, and the linux HD to slave only, and it didnt work initially, but then i swapped the drives around on the IDE cable, so that the windows HD was on the outer connector, and the linux HD on the inner, and now the bios detects both drives, and the computer boots windows so that problem has been solved, thanks for all your suggestions

now, i suspect i need to load lilo onto the windows HD MBR and somehow chainload to the linux HD?

Sounds link you almost have it .

nope, i just trashed my windows MBR
i got a page of '9A 9A 9A' where the boot messages should have been.



thankfully i had a recent ghost image, because i didnt know how to correct the situation. unfotunately i have no internet connection in linux yet. can anyone shed any light on how to boot both OS which reside on seperate drives?

I don't know what the easiest way to do it is, but they way I'd personally do it would be to create a /boot partition on hda. That way, grub can operate when hda is the only drive in the system. Depending on how the Windows drive is set up, it might not even require creating a new partition. It's common for a Windows setup to include a "hidden" recovery partition in FAT format. I think it should be possible to cram GRUB's files in there without messing anything up.

Things can be a real pain if the BIOS can't handle GRUB loading up from a partition outside the first 512megs (or something like that).

thanks IsaacKuo

could always use the NT bootloader to boot Linux..
the opposite of how most of us do it, but I have used this method in the past and it works..

http://highlandsun.com/hyc/linuxboot.html
http://www.geocities.com/epark/linux...w2k-HOWTO.html

basically you would install grub to the /boot partition in Linux rather than on the MBR.. then you use dd to copy the bootloader to a file. Boot into windows, copy that botloader file to your windows drive and add an entry for it in boot.ini

thanks farslayer, ill give that a try.