Dual boot windows xp on seperate HDD
 

Mandrake 10.0

Dual boot with windows XP on different HDD does not work. I set it up to go to /hdb for booting, but this does not work. I tried hdb/windows too.

It comes up with blank screen and crashes.

:-s Any ideas?

Also, I wish to switch to SuSe because it seems a bit more intergrated in terms of Samba, CUPs and server software.

Is this worth the money, I can get it for £40

How about " /dev/hdb "?

You can download SUSE 9.3 for free too.

/dev/hdb is what it is selected to by default, but this didnt work. So I added hdb to try that.

SuSe Linux Professional 9.3 is a trial version, or a LIVE cd, which does not work in the same way as an installation, it;s more like Mandrivia Move.

Also, I've heard reports of SuSe being a buggy version of Linux, but surely cant be worse than Mandrake - thats also known for bugs.

Save your money for a very small crazy party. All the things you want are free.

Check the harddrive cables and bios settings. Can you boot into anything at all? I'm confused, did you say that you installed the OS, but couldn't boot into it?

Cheers

Hi,

lol..

Xp boots, yes. It's on a seperate drive.

When booting from drive with linux and then selecting Windows from LILO in mandrake 10 it just goes blank and goes no further.

But Linux boots ok on hda? If so, all you should have to do is edit the boot parameters for windows in /etc/lilo.conf. Probably it's booting from /dev/hdb, so try /dev/hdb or /dev/hdb1. If you still have no luck, post the contents of lilo.conf and the results of "fdisk hdb"

Cheers

[Edit] ahem: "fdisk -l /dev/hdb" or "fdisk -l", not "fdisk hdb"

i don't know if anyone else has had any luck doing it another way, but
i think that windows is kinda picky. That it needs to be on the first
partiton and that needs to be a primary partition. Which means that
unless its on /dev/hda1 it wont boot properly.

again though, if anyone knows different, feel free to prove me wrong.

Any primary partition will do as far as I know. Some people boot multiple versions of windows on the same drive, so it must be able to boot off higher than the first partition on a drive.

[Edit] It seems that windows has to be on the first primary partition in order to boot multiple versions of windows from later primary partitions.

it can... google for a "dual boot linux windows lilo" and see what that turns up. I think this is a lilo problem- sorry I can't help you much more- I use grub. :p

titanium_geek

also, i forgot. it needs to be flagged as active. that's probably important too.

How do you flag it as active?

I think you can do it, but it dont work!

I loaded Fedora on a separate HD and couldn't get it to boot either. XP boots fine. I loaded the same version of Fedora on my laptop in another logical drive and it boots great. So no help but more ?????