Hello everyone

My father has just upgraded to a new machine. XP home was preinstalled. I then installed Ubuntu on seperate partitions. The usual ubuntu grub installation for a dual boot was setup automatically and works like a charm. Here is the snag: my father wants to use some old DOS programs from inside XP and I gather this is not possible since XP does not run on top of a full version of DOS. I am not a dos user, but he has tried, and has reseached this and that's what he was told.

Here is my plan:
install the old hard drive into the new machine. This hard drive contains a working copy of win98 and is configured to his wishes. This drive will be installed as second hard drive.
Modify Grub (resident on the main drive) to be able to boot on that second hard drive into win98.

Before I attempt this, what are the unforseen difficulties, is it even possible, how do I point grub to that extra hard drive etc.?

Could someone give me some pointers?

thank you very much.

Christian

One advice..if you can (and if we're talking about IDE drives here), plug the 2nd harddisk to the first IDE cable - if you have your first harddrive on the same cable with a cd/dvd-drive of some kind, unplug the cd/dvd-drive, put your 2nd harddisk instead there, and connect the cd/dvd-drive to the secondary IDE-cable. This is because it seems booting an operating system from a harddisk on a secondary ide cable does not work all right..it might or might not help but try out, at least if you're unable to boot Win98 from the 2nd harddisk after plugging it to a secondary IDE cable. If it's something else than IDE (say scsi), then forget the above.

Your first harddisk is most probably known as "hda" to Linux, and it's partitions hda1, hda2 etc..the second harddisk should pop up as hdb, and it's partitions hdb1 etc. Grub uses a bit different marking method, but if you look at the XP part of your grub's menu.lst you should be able to add your Win98 entry there, imitating the XP entry - just set the partition to boot from be on your second harddisk. If I recall correctly, the first partition on your first harddisk (where XP is probably installed?) is hd(0,1) or something. So your second harddisk's first partition would be hd(1,1) in this case, if I'm right..well, I'm working on a Win2k at the moment so bear me, but that's where I'd start from. The Grub entry for Win98 is quite similar to that of XP's, except you need to change the partition in the entry to point to the 2nd harddisk.

Good luck

Rather than complicate things with still another o/s installation which will only be accessible by a separate boot, why not look into DOS emulation under Linux? Maybe your father can run what he needs to run in the emulator and still have access to all the good things Linux brings?

Check this out and see whether it will suit his needs:

http://www.dosemu.org/

Cheers.