Thanks for the ideas. I will check the GRUB stuff.

If you can think of, or know someone who knows, how to get a windows XP bootloader to run GRUB (on a separate physical drive), please let me know. It is supposedly not hard to do (and would keep me from having to choose the boot drive in the BIOS), but I just cannot find any explanations specific to GRUB, and in plain english.

Thanks again!

Your windows ntloader question is answered here (today, actually). Is there any reason why you couldn't physically swap the drives and install GRUB or LILO to the MBR of it, adding Windows as an optio to the boot? You could swap 'em back if the wierd reason for not Linuxing comes up (which it won't ever, right? )

Unfortunately, not.

The primary drive sits in a fixed caddy, and the secondary drive is modular.

I am curious, though:

If I pulled the primary drive, installed Linux on the secondary, with an MBR, then shoved the other drive back in, BIOS would likely choose the MBR on a first come, first serve basis.

Does anyone see any problem with that?

Thanks again.

BB

Not I

During install of Linux, it labels the partitions hda, hdc, blah blah. Once Linux is installed, and the other drive is returned, Linux would not have a problem with it? I already know XP wouldn't as 1) XP will take its mbr resident loader and run with it, and 2) XP doesn't have a clue what a Linux partition looks like.

Just concerned with Linux, as it is a lot more advanced in the drive department (which is why I want it in the first place).

If you have any further thoughts on that specific, please let me know.

Thanks again.

PS: what I really wanted in the first place is what you, vec, described in your other post....independent opsys on independent drives. Sooner or later, my Windows drives always crack up, particularly on hot temp laptops. This way, I could just boot to Linux, without a hassle, regardless of what hostile actions XP takes against me.

PSS:

With this configuration, does anyone see any reason why I could not format an unpartitioned portion of the secondary drive NTFS, and access it from Windows.

No problem. Before I got seduced by Mandrake 10's 2.6 kernel and kde 3.2 and gnome 2.4 and (what the hell, lets install sun's java 1.5 beta too! - the best java for the client I have come across yet for linux, despite its growing file size!) all the other new bleeding goodies.........wait! there was a question to be answered here, wasn't there? ...........I had a hard drive install of Mepis on that drive (1/2) and an NTFS partition for storage of other stuff (1/2). I didn't try writing to it from Linux, though. The data wasn't throw-away (but its now burnt and the drive is all linux baby!)

Guess what? I am going to give this a try, and will post results in about 2 hours.

Back so soon.....yes.

So I pull the prim drive. It shares the controller with the CD drive, so when yanked, the CD drive is lost. What a crime.

Then I read the LILO post, and realize I can't make a boot disk and transfer the image over to Windows to use in its booter, as I can't run the secondary drive and a floppy at the same time - they go in the same slot, so its one or the other.

Now, back to my original post, as I still want to get this thing running dual-boot.

If I scrap the XP bootloader in favor of GRUB or LILO, when I pull that secondary drive (for whatever reason - like say stuffing a battery in its place for a quick trip) the new bootloader doesn't work just with Windows (on the primary drive). At least that is what I found with GRUB - if it can't find all its listed operating systems, it just hangs on boot.

Is there any way around that (ie does LILO act differently than GRUB in this respect).

Thanks again.

BB

Another idea entirely: install lilo or grub to the linux drive. grab GAG and install it to you Windows mbr. Done. if you remove the linux drive, you still can boot to Linux (I don't know why I didn't think of this before). I was introduced to it by the guy who brought me into the Linux world. he couldn't handle lilo or grub so he used this. Get the image. make a disk. boot from it. install it to the hd. boot to win or lin. Pour yourself a tall one.

That is another great thought.

At this point, however, I decided to go for broke. I dismantled both the primary drive caddy and the secondary module. Put the secondary drive in the primary caddy, reinitialized the disk, and ran a quick install. I am about five minutes away from having both drives in the chassis, and seeing if the BIOS can handle two MBRs.

If you don't hear back from me, you'll know the whole machine is toast.

If I don't hear from you, does that mean you have the whole machine for linux? heh heh

Ha! Good one. Unfortunately for all of us, XP remains.

Dang thing works pretty well. BIOS takes an extra second to figure out what is going on, but other than that, all is fairly well.

NVIDIA drivers loaded, and I had 1600x1200 on first shot. The wireless card of course failed (I don't have Broadcom drivers or ndiswrapper in). The NTFS logical drive format on the back end of the secondary drive finished while I was here typing.

The slightly bigger issue that will need fixing is the swap partition. It failed to mount (I think thats what it was - just said FAILED in big red letters). Once I get a connection running (likely with hard wire at first), I will likely need help figuring that one out.

Does the XFree log show that kind of stuff, or is there another log for deeper issues I should be looking at?

Thanks for all the help, vec and others.

Swap problem has been fixed.

The participants in this forum are fine fine people!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!