My setup includes two "cradle type" spaces for hard drives. Normally, I have only one drive in place and it has only Windows XP on it. My backup procedure for XP has been to insert a drive into the slave position and clone the drive in master position to the slave drive, using Acronis 9.

Am new to Linux. Have Windows XP as only thing on a 40 gb drive--ide drive 0 (master). Have Linux Ubuntu as only thing on a 30 gb drive--ide drive 1(slave). Have been doing well with a GRUB loader that gives me choice of XP or Linux on bootup.

I now have a problem in using my XP backup procedure. If I remove the slave drive with Linux on it, and insert a drive for backup, I cannot boot to the master drive until I use the FIXMBR option in Windows Recovery Console.

When I attempt to return to using the XP drive with the Linux drive in place, I cannot boot. I solved this by re-installing Ubuntu but that leaves me with the same problem when I next want to clone XP to a backup drive. Re-installing Ubuntu is not so bad, but doing so destroys all the "arranging" I did in it previously--for instance my e-mail, my documents etc.

I apologize for such a long post, but I find this problem difficult to describe.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

There's a couple of ways to handle this. The first is to buy an external enclosure for your spare disk, and then do your backup. Another solution would be to use a backup solution that boots from a live CD of some type. The other way I can think of off-hand is to install GRUB onto the Windows drive, so that you can maintain your bootloader on the drive that's never removed.

Thanks for the reply and suggestions. Your suggestion inre a live cd prompted me to try an XP boot floppy and that seems to work just fine.

For the future, how would I go about installing GRUB on the Windows drive?

you could alternatively use ntldr to boot grub/ubuntu with the help of bootpart. grub would have to be installed on your linux drive first though.

I have no experience yet with grub, just lilo, but I do believe you can make a grub boot floppy that will boot xp or linux as well.

either way should let you swap out your slave drive drive without interfering with boots.

Thanks for the tip. I will look into it.
Harold