Can you set up your BIOS to select a particular hdd to check first? I have a 40GB IDE drive I use for Windoze XP (college project), and a 250 GB SATA drive that I use for FreeBSD/Gentoo Linux. I had to tweak my bios a bit to get the SATA drive placed before the IDE drives in the boot order so grub would load first.

That's certainly good to hear...any complaints as of yet?

If it were me at this point, I would make sure both drives are hooked up and that your BIOS is set the way you stated to me in your email. Then just boot your 'puter with the install disk and choose "Upgrade" That should reconfigure your boot loader without you needing to get "under the hood" and being a newbie like me, that's a good thing. Getting under the hood in Linux is better left till you feel more comforable with the system. The newer versions of most of the distros take care of these little things quite well.

Hope this works for you and of course, if it does, you'll be up and running then bragging to all your friends about all the neat things you can do with your non-windoze 'puter that they still can't, even with Vista! Heh, heh!

hey guys guess what it worked well sort of, i got windows now on my sata hard drive and SUSE 10.2 on my ide 200gb hard drive and im well chuffed, installed with no problems and picked up both hard drives. only thing is i can only get into my linux os by booting from the install cd so i guess grub has quite been installed right but other that that it all went wee thanx for all the good advice got me there with ease! any idea whats happened to the dual boot thing? cheers once again

OK! Sometimes the upgrade option just doesn't work. You have two choices here, either try it again with a complete installation or check your "man" pages for help configuring GRUB. The later gets you started learning how to fix some of your initial problems, the other should get everything up and running with no fuss. Oh, I was wrong there is a third option-you can keep looking for help online, and trust me on this, there is a lot available. I'm just not a hacker, myself, so I can't help you any further. I can do so few things with the command line that i'm not much help to anyone, unless the solution is very simple.

Which sounds like you selected the option to put the grub onto the "linux drive". Thats why I did suggest that you have to put it onto the first section of the first hard drive i.e. probably the windows drive (presuming that thats the way you've got it set up). Yes, as I said, it will overwrite the windows bootloader, but thats quite normal, because it allows the bootloader to see all installed OS and subsequently offer you the choice of what you want to boot - otherwise it means re-installing the grub to the correct location (you'd have to google for that) or you can always google for how to make a windows bootloader boot a linux install (possible but a little more involved if I remember correctly) or making a boot floppy or boot CD (you can already get into it with the install CD - I always just found that a complete PITA) or you can keep changing the boot settings in the BIOS (also rather inconvenient).

You've got it installed so it's now "your ball park"

well done

regards

John

what is happening is that i am installing grub onto the SuSE hard drive and not over the windows bootloader. under the bootin tab on the install i can set a custom boot location, it gives me a selection of places but only one being on my sata hard drive /dev/sda2 im wondering if my windows boot loader is there? my windows drives are shown there as sda1 and sda5

If you connect the windows drive as the first drive, and then run the install program again, you should be able to fix the grub configuration. After the agreement page and the language selection, you will be asked whether this is a new install or an upgrade. On the bottom of the page is an "Other" button. Select that and then select repair. The repair process will locate the SuSE installation on the second drive and update the MBR on the first disk so that it can load. It is also possible to fix /boot/grub/menu.lst manually, changing references to hd0 to hd1, and adding an entry for windows, but the repair option will be easier. There was no reason to disconnect the windows drive when doing the install. Selecting the second disk, the install program would have configured grub properly for duel booting.

Another option is to google for "grub dual boot NT". There are several websites detailing how to use the XP's NTLdr program to boot into windows. This will leave the MBR on the first disk alone and instead change the C:/boot.ini file to load in a file copy of the linux loader. Copied from the MBR on the second drive. Some people prefer this method.