I have a machine with Win2K on the IDE disk and SUSE linux on the SCSI disk.
I can switch the disks in my BIOS setup (so that either one can be the first disk).

I tried to setup the Linux bootloader to optionally load Win2K - and I can see it is willing to - but the actual boot of Win2K fails. It may have to do with Windows requiring to always be on the first disk? So when I set my SCSI / linux disk as first, I can't boot Win2K from the IDE disk...

I also tried to put the Linux bootloader on the IDE disk, but that destroyed the Win2K bootloader (and I had to use the repair function from the Win2K CD).

Does anyone have an idea how to get a dual boot running? (Apart from having to squeeze both systems into the first 2GB of just one disk)

Thanks

I think that GRUB (Grand Unified Boot Loader) allows you to swap the disks dynamically. This should solve your problem. For more information on this see the GRUB manual.

Are you saying that a bootloader can actually override the BIOS setting and put the IDE disk as first disk even if the BIOS has it configured as second? Well, I'll look it up in the GRUB manual and see if it says something on that.

By the way my motherboard is an ASUS P2B-LS with AWARD BIOS and an integrated SCSI bios.

Thanks for your thoughts.

Yes GRUB does the swaping. I did it for my 2 IDE disks. For Linux boot, I wanted primary master as disk 0 and secondary master as disk 1. For Windows boot, I want to swap them. I achieved it without changing in BIOS. GRUB is excellent.

Well then I know how to get it working...

All I have to do is buy a second IDE disk (which I would like to do anyway for lack of space); then I would have an equivalent of your HW setup which is known to work.

I'll see whether it is possible with my SCSI disk first anyway (just out of curiosity and to postpone the money drain). I'll let you know what I've found.

Greetings