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snowman156 01-21-2004 11:09 PM

Dual Boot, XPpro & RH9, Two hard drives
 
I'm venturing into my second linux install. My first was a dual boot on my laptop w/ XP home and RH9. For that install I partitioned 30g to windows and 10g to the Redhat and I overwrote the MBR with grub and had no problems.

I recently build my first desktop and now successfully have the XP Pro set up on the first hard drive and I installed RH9 on the second drive, /dev/hdb1. For this install I did not overwrite the MBR with grub and chose grub to load RH9 as the default os. The install was clean, I made a recovery disk, and rebooted.

With my bios set to boot from HDD 0 first and HDD 1 second, I logged in normall the XP, no problems. I then rebooted, reset the boot order to HDD 1 first, and all that happens is that the screen freezes at the word GRUB. I tried the boot disk but that did not work as well. during the boot up w/ the floppy, it did a few checks and then just froze saying it couldn't initialize the drive.

My ultimate goal was to have each drive boot independently and then use the PQBoot as the intial boot loader (or chooser I guess would be the correct terminology).

I need help, is grub not looking at the correct drive? Any help would be appreciated. Thanks in advance.

born4linux 01-22-2004 03:07 AM

u didn't install grub in the MBR so it won't load if you tried booting on its hard drive. what you can do is re-install grub in the MBR of your 2nd hard drive or have winxp's nt loader to load linux instead of using PQBoot or chaning your boot drives in your BIOS.

thundercat420 01-22-2004 06:11 PM

I am running the same sort of configuration. I have rh9 on my first drive, and xp on my second. here's what I did:

install each OS on its own drive, and make sure they both boot properly (with only 1 HD connected at a time)

make sure the RH9 disk is booting to the graphical kernel/OS selectino screen. NOT "GRUB>". that's teh grub console, if it boots to taht there was a problem on install.

if everything is ok, XP boots and grub boots to the graphical select screen, your golden and ready for the next step.

Configuring Grub to boot from second drive.

switch to root and add this to the bottom of (if my memory dosnt fail me)"/boot/grub/menu.lst".

#------------------------------------------
title WinXP
map (0) (1)
map (1) (0)
rootnoverify (hd,1,0)
chainloader +1
makeactive
boot
#-------------------------------------------

Make sure your linux drive is set to master and xp set to slave. This will trick your system into thinking the XP drive is first on the IDE chain, and the linux drive is second. It shold boot normally. It will automatically recognize any windows partition on the linux drive as well. I have a 2 fat32 partitions on my linux drive, one for installing Windows Games, and another for Swap. It's amazing how much faster gaems run when windows gets its own drive.

Hope this helps.
eric in michigan

randon 01-22-2004 07:13 PM

Wow, Thundercat420, that helped ME alot and it's not even my problem.:)
Why do you say games run faster when XP gets it's own drive?
RANDON

linuxlinus 01-22-2004 07:33 PM

Hello Thundercat420,

May be you can help me with my problem...

I've installed Windows2000 on my 1st HDD (hda -> vfat),
then installed RH8 Linux on my 2nd HDD (hdb1,2,3 -> ext3).
Hence I can tell how fast my pc bootup and shutdown
with only Windows2000 installation (i.e. before my RH8
linux installation).

But after I have installed both o/s on 2 physically separated
HDD, I have realized it takes much much longer for my pc
to bootup and shutdown with Windows2000.

Have you noticed this? Or would you happen to know what
causes this speed degration issue?

I look forward to hear from you. Thanks in advance.

Regards,
Linuxlinus
:newbie:

snowman156 01-23-2004 05:41 AM

Thanks linux4linus and thundercat. I'm not going to have time to try the reinstall for a few days but I'll let you know what happens.

bobjunga 01-23-2004 11:45 AM

Thundercat, your information is timely for me too. I have been researching dual boot yesterday and today and I wonder if you could clarify a few things for me since you seem to know what's going on. My goal today is to add Fedora to an existing WinXP box on a new, 2nd drive.

When you say "This will trick your system into thinking the XP drive is first on the IDE chain, and the linux drive is second." are you talking about the magic that Grub does before paasing off control to the WinXP loader? WinXP boots calling hdb1 the c: drive?

In your scenario, the system always gives control to hda, mbr where it finds Grub. Then Grub either ...
1) passes control, normally to the Linux on hda, or
2) changes some system stuff and passes control to WinXP on hdb. The system stuff fools WinXP into thinking that the slave drive is the first drive so that it starts naming partitions on the slave drive with 'C:'.

The beauty of this set up is that each OS thinks its on the first drive, so later you can easily remove a drive and turn the machine back into a single boot. XP is installed on the c: drive and Linux is on hda.

Apparently, you could put WinXP on the first drive and then install Linux to hdb and not use the Grub trick, but then Linux could not run without some other drive in the hda position so you are kind of stuck with dual boot. Is that true?

Questions:
1) is it possible to modify the Grub config to trick the system into thinking the secondary master is first?

2) Is there a significant performance difference between the master and slave drive?

3) Can you use Grub in this manner to dual boot WinXP and Solaris? I wanted to try out Solaris quickly without having to figure out dual boot so I have been manually swapping hard drives on one machine. The tricky part I would imagine is installing Grub to the Solaris drive's mbr under Solaris. Maybe I could floppy boot a Linux and install grub that way.

Thanks,

--BobG

thundercat420 01-30-2004 11:17 PM

"When you say "This will trick your system into thinking the XP drive is first on the IDE chain, and the linux drive is second." are you talking about the magic that Grub does before paasing off control to the WinXP loader? WinXP boots calling hdb1 the c: drive?"

* Yes.

"Apparently, you could put WinXP on the first drive and then install Linux to hdb and not use the Grub trick, but then Linux could not run without some other drive in the hda position so you are kind of stuck with dual boot. Is that true?"

* No. Your not stuck with dual boot. Pull the linux drive out and win boots just fine. Same for linux. The settings you put in grubs conf file for windows are used ONLY when booting windows. ( note to the universe: those conf settings are suposed to be added UNDER the linux boot settings, not in place of.)IF you select linux from the grub menu then it wont give a crap what drives are connected. AS long as linux is present.
The problem with putting windows as the primary is microsofts boot loader is a pain in the behind. It's possible, but don't expect it to be easy.

"Questions:
1) is it possible to modify the Grub config to trick the system into thinking the secondary master is first?"

* I really couldnt tell ya for sure, try it. Boot to grub on a HD on your priamry master, and have a another bootable HD on the secondary IDE. See if grub assigns a dev ID (HD3,0) perhaps. I dont really know grubs limitations. I think it might also depens on your motherboards capabilities.

"2) Is there a significant performance difference between the master and slave drive?"

* not that i've noticed. Right now my linux drive is messed up and i havent had time to work on it. my xp drive is still slave, but is the only HD plugged in. Boots and runs just fine.

"3) Can you use Grub in this manner to dual boot WinXP and Solaris? I wanted to try out Solaris quickly without having to figure out dual boot so I have been manually swapping hard drives on one machine. The tricky part I would imagine is installing Grub to the Solaris drive's mbr under Solaris. Maybe I could floppy boot a Linux and install grub that way."

* I have a feeling this grub trick will work the exact same way for any other bootable OS or drive. As long as grub can assign ID's to the drive and partition then it sould work just fine. Sometimes you have to messaround with the "hide" and "unhide" commands in grub to hide partitions so the system will boot properly. AS long as the boot partition is first on the drive there shouldnt be a problem.

hope this helps
by the way, it took me hours to get this working right, ive only been using red hat for about 3 months.
eric in michigan

thundercat420 01-30-2004 11:20 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by randon
Wow, Thundercat420, that helped ME alot and it's not even my problem.:)
Why do you say games run faster when XP gets it's own drive?
RANDON

Games run faster when you set XP you do RAM caching on a different drive than the game files are on was my point. Its not that important if you have lots of ram. i only have 196 so it makes a difference.

snowman156 01-30-2004 11:56 PM

Well, not quite right....

Thundercat420, I added the lines you provided and completely screwed it up. And, since I have a habit of not backing up original config files, I'm not sure how to revert and just ended up formating the drive. When I loaded rebooted with the lines you indicated, there was an "illegal operation" or something of the likes and it just went to the grub> prompt. After that, I could only load up linux from the boot disk and even after I tried 1) updating the boot loader and 2) setting up a new boot loader configuration from the rehat install disk, I would get a infinite list of scrolling "GRUB" on the screen. I ended up formating the drive through Win XP and using Partition Magic.

This time I am going simple: install grub to the MBR of the second hard drive (hdb1) and booting that drive. My main impetus for trying to circumvent grub was that with my first Linux install on my laptop, after every update from RH it would add the new kernel as a seperate OS on the grub menu and after a few months I had about 6 or 7 Redhats and one DOS. It worked, but was an annoyance. I know the file to tweak to avoid that now so for my purposes, that's all that matters.

I appreciate your help and although the advice didn't do exactly what I wanted, it oddly gave me a simpler method to achieve my ultimate goal.

Next project: dual monitors on an geforce FX 5200 dual head card.

sjia 01-31-2004 12:02 AM

Thundercat can u help me too. :D

I want to install SuSE, Red Hat and Mandrake on separate partitions on one hard drive. I have already installed SuSE and I tried to create a boot loader floppy but I keep getting the same error. I think it's a bug in the software.
If I now install Red Hat and Mandrake, will I be able to load SuSE?
Should I be using another method to install this software so I can have the option of booting by selection.
I now a heck of alot about windows partitioning but I do not know anything about linux partition and the effect of making the wrong selections.
I have read on this site about GRUB but I do not now how to call this program so I can run it.

Lost in Linux but I will persevere. I'm a windows deserter

thundercat420 02-02-2004 12:25 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by snowman156
Well, not quite right....

Thundercat420, I added the lines you provided and completely screwed it up. And, since I have a habit of not backing up original config files, I'm not sure how to revert and just ended up formating the drive. When I loaded rebooted with the lines you indicated, there was an "illegal operation" or something of the likes and it just went to the grub> prompt. After that, I could only load up linux from the boot disk and even after I tried 1) updating the boot loader and 2) setting up a new boot loader configuration from the rehat install disk, I would get a infinite list of scrolling "GRUB" on the screen. I ended up formating the drive through Win XP and using Partition Magic.

This time I am going simple: install grub to the MBR of the second hard drive (hdb1) and booting that drive. My main impetus for trying to circumvent grub was that with my first Linux install on my laptop, after every update from RH it would add the new kernel as a seperate OS on the grub menu and after a few months I had about 6 or 7 Redhats and one DOS. It worked, but was an annoyance. I know the file to tweak to avoid that now so for my purposes, that's all that matters.

I appreciate your help and although the advice didn't do exactly what I wanted, it oddly gave me a simpler method to achieve my ultimate goal.

Next project: dual monitors on an geforce FX 5200 dual head card.

MY BAD, i think i know what the problem was.
a typo on my part
"rootnoverify (hd,1,0)" should have been "rootnoverify (hd1,0)"
i think, extra comma
im drunk
superbowl, too bad bout carolina

e

rootnoverify (hd1,0)

bobjunga 02-03-2004 04:53 PM

Dual boot - add Linux to XP (was Dual Boot, CPpro & RH9, Two hard drives)
 
I ended up not doing the 2 drive solution. Since my new, 2nd drive is large (120gb) did it the traditional (and very easy) way, which allowed me to reuse the old drive in another system.

For anyone researching dual boot, here is my account of adding Fedora Core to an existing WinXP boot. My understanding is that you need unallocated space on the drive to install Linux onto. I got it by transferring the existing drive to a partition on a new, larger drive. I do not know it WinXP allows you to shrink a partition, but you could always do this by moving to a temporary drive and then back.

1) I temporarily installed the new drive as primary slave. Using the existing OS (WinXP) I created the first partition (50gb) on the drive and made it active.

2) I booted Norton Ghost from a floppy and transfered my existing WinXP drive (single NTFS) to the new partition on the new drive.

3) removed old drive and switch the new to the primary master position. Booted WinXp to confirm it was still the same.

4) Then I installed Fedora Core 1 by booting off the CD.

5) the Auto Partition wizard recognized the empty portion of the hd and left the WinXP partition alone.

6) The Grub portion of the install recognized the 'dos' partition and automatically gave me entries for 'dos' (which I renamed WinXP) and Fedora Core. I chose to install Grub to the MBR, thus overwriting the WinXP MBR. I was able to choose which OS was the default.

7) Test booted each OS and both worked. To change Grub options in the future, boot Linux and look in das /boot for grub.conf

--BobG


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