two hard drives on same cable
 

I have two EIDE hard drives on my computer...one XP and one Fedora 6.

I have installed both OS's seperately. When I say seperately, I mean I put in one hard drive, installed Windows and then removed that one and put in the other and installed Fedora.

Now I want to put both drives in the the bay and I want the bios to come up when I power on and let me choose which drive I want to boot. I figure when I get both drives in, I will configure grub on Fedora to point to the XP drive unless it does it automatically....I am not sure.

However, I do not know how to set the jumpers on the drives. I do not think I want a Master / Slave setting since one drive will not be an extension of the other...do I?

Also, I do not think I can have two Master's on the same IDE cable.

Can anyone give me any info on this?

Put both drives on cable select. Plug the fedora drive into the master connection and the XP drive into the slave connection.

Then boot into fedora and edit /boot/grub.conf (I think that's what fedora calls it). Add a section at the end of the file like What will happen is that you will boot into grub every time, then you can choose windows or linux. The map commands trick XP into thinking it is the primary master drive so it doesn't even know about the fedora drive.

EDIT: after a quick google, it looks like the file to edit is /boot/grub/grub.conf

yep you want master slave. set linux as the master, windows as the slave and then just configure grub you chain load the windows drive. there's a slight trick here, you need to lie to windows to make it think it's the master when you choose it, using the map command - just check the grub manpage or google for "grub map drive xp" or something, and you'll see how to neatly swap master and slave in the bios dynamically.

see... that's what you get for going to talke to the wife half way through. someone gets there first! i wouldn't recommend the cable select stuff though, but then i just never use cable select anyway, much simpler to just hard set each drive.

I have tried what you guys have suggested but I am having problems getting the boot loader to see the XP drive. Just to make sure that I didn't toast my XP,I removed the Fedora hard drive and booted the XP drive and yes it is still there. (I am just paranoid that way)

Anyway, here is a recap of what I did:

I put the Fedora drive on the Master connector of the IDE cable and put the XP drive on the slave (middle) part of the cable. I initially tried to use the cable select setting on the jumpers for both drives, but upon bootup I received a repeatin error message for hd0, hd1 and it just kept repeating until I shut it down. So, I set the jumper for the Fedora hard drive to Master and the XP drive to slave.

I did not receive error messages with this setting, but only Fedora will boot. Grub does appear however, but only the Fedora kernel is visible. XP is not there. Here is the configuration for my grub.conf file:

An important thing to note:

When I changed the drives around, I get a prompt upon bootup that says that the hardware config has changed and if I want to save the settings. It will then list the drives that I have (the cdrom, the Linux drive, and the XP drive). So to me that means that the system does see the second drive....I just don't know why grub cannot.

There is a setup utility that I activate to check the hard drive settings and here is what is says:

IDE Primary 0 Linux hard drive (It realyy doesn't say "Linux hard drive" but the make and model of that drive
IDE Primary 1 Windows hard drive
CDRom Make and model of CDROM

Any suggestions?