Dual boot FC5 and WinXP on IDE and Sata drives
 

Hi,

I have had a 80GB IDE drive with Win XP home installed on it for years. I decided to purchase a SATA drive to install FC5 and then be able to dual boot to either XP or FC5. Windows would be on the IDE and FC on the SATA.

the IDE drive is the primary drive. I install FC5 to the SATA drive (sda) and have GRUB install to the MBR on hda (my IDE drive). FC5 recognizes both hard drives and I perform the standard install on sda only.
When I reboot, GRUB does not load and it automatically goes to windows XP.

Is this type of install possible? In my bios I have it to look first on the IDE then onto the SATA. If I swith those around, the system just hangs.

I have tried intalling grub to the Sata drive but that does not solve the issue and I only get GRUB and a cursor on a black sceen.

Thanks ahead for the help,

Ryan

PS: Googled this problem and can not seem to find a solution to this problem. I see similar configs but where linux is instaled on the IDE and XP on the Sata.

Thanks!

From my experience, mixing IDE and SATA drives is a royal pain, but possible. I've found that it's usually best to put GRUB on the SATA drive. You did this and just got to the GRUB console. Usually, the reason for this is because GRUB gets the order of the drives backwards. Remember, GRUB uses a different scheme (hd0, hd1, etc.) to name hard drives. You need to go into /boot/grub and edit the device.map file to make sure that hd0 and hd1 point to the correct drives. Then you need to make sure that GRUB can find the /bopot partition. It should have picked it up automatically but you may need to re-run grub-install.

I got Grub to work doing the following:
Switch the boot order in the BIOS to SATA drive first then the IDE drive.
I then installed FC5. Under the advanced configuration I changed the drive order to Sata first then IDE. Then I selected to install grub to the MBR on dev/sda
After, reboot, GRUB loaded and was able to choose to boot to FC5. it loaded correctly !!!!
However, if I chose to boot to windows from GRUB i can't! I get a black screen saying:
booting 'other'
rootnoverify (hd1,0)
chainloader +1

then nothing
The only way for me to do it, is to change the order in the BIOS to IDE first and Sata second.

I will surf the internet for a solution to this pb. If anyone has an idea I would be glad to try it out. I will post if I find the solution to booting to XP without having to mess with the boot order.

Thanks ahead of time,
Ryan

Finally got everything to work and boot correctly. Here is my GRUB.conf:

# grub.conf generated by anaconda
#
# Note that you do not have to rerun grub after making changes to this file
# NOTICE: You have a /boot partition. This means that
# all kernel and initrd paths are relative to /boot/, eg.
# root (hd0,0)
# kernel /vmlinuz-version ro root=/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00
# initrd /initrd-version.img
#boot=/dev/sda
default=0
timeout=5
splashimage=(hd0,0)/grub/splash.xpm.gz
#hiddenmenu
title Fedora Core (2.6.17-1.2174_FC5smp)
root (hd0,0)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.17-1.2174_FC5smp ro root=/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 rhgb quiet
initrd /initrd-2.6.17-1.2174_FC5smp.img
title Fedora Core (2.6.15-1.2054_FC5smp)
root (hd0,0)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.15-1.2054_FC5smp ro root=/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 rhgb quiet
initrd /initrd-2.6.15-1.2054_FC5smp.img
title Windows
rootnoverify (hd1,0)
map (hd0) (hd1)
map (hd1) (hd0)
makeactive
chainloader +1

################################################

This config works. I have a question however: I was able to load windows this way:
title Windows

rootnoverify (hd1,0)
hide (hd0,0)
map (hd0) (hd1)
map (hd1) (hd0)
makeactive
chainloader +1

the added difference is the hide (hd0,0) option. this allowed me to boot to the windows partition also. However, after booting to windows and upon restart of the system. I would only get the text based version of GRUB where I had to manually enter:
rootnoverify (hd1,0)
hide (hd0,0)
map (hd0) (hd1)
map (hd1) (hd0)
makeactive
chainloader +1
and I could not find anything that was supposed to be on (hd0,0) from running at the GRUB prompt "find /etc/fstab" or find /vmlinuz. It seemed like it could not look into (hd0,0) (my linux boot partition).

so I decided to type unhide (hd0,0) and then reboot. Upon reboot I got the Grub splash and menu and could choose the different boot options. I then took the hide (hd0,0) out of the GRUB.conf for the windows section. Now everything works well.

How does hide(hd0,0) work? How come I had to unhide it after? Thanks for the help.

Ryan