Dual booting with Red Hat and WinXP- Help!
 

I have Red Hat v9 installed on my main hard drive which is on IDE0 as the master. I would like to install winXP onto my secondary hard drive which is on IDE1 as the slave. Would I be able to dual boot normally? Could I boot winXP when I want and Red Hat when I want without incurring any serious mbr errors? Please help!!

I also dual boot red hat 9 with windows XP...windows XP boot loader does not recognise the linux partition, so here is what you do...

1. delete linux
2. install windows
3. re-install linux

why do this? simple, redhat recognises all windows partitions so it sets up the boot loader for you, windows xp does not recognise linux.

Right but theyd be on seperate drives. Would that make a difference?

Disconnect the main drive and put the secondary drive on primay master, install winxp on it, put the harddrives back where they were, boot into redhat and add this to your /boot/grub/grub.conf
this way the MBR on your main drive doesn't get touched, and if you feel like it you can safely remove winxp or redhat without affecting the other, if you remove redhat all you need to do is connect the winxp drive to primary master.

Thanks but when I try to modify grub.conf it says that the file cant be read. Whats up with that.

you need to do it as root, type "su" then enter your root password

Just to be sure. I reinstall the harddrives into their original order and THEN modify grub.conf?? Doesn't make sense to me but I'm obviously not the expert.

Doesn't really matter, editing grub.conf only adds an entry in grub when you boot, obviously if you try to boot winxp which hasn't been installed yet it will fail.

And what about the MBR. When windows installs wont it modify the MBR, and doesnt the MBR have to be on hda - hard drive 1??? So in this procedure there would be two MBRs???

Yea each drive can have a mbr, xp will modify the mbr on the drive its on during installation, but only the drive that is set to the first bootable device is going to be used.
If you connect your winxp drive to primary master, or set in bios to boot from D: first it'll load winxp directly.

Thanks for all your help bro. And finally. So if I install WinXP to the secondary and leave that drive as the slave, then the Red Hat booter program will start when I boot the computer (assuming I leave the BIOS set to boot from the master hard drive), and the booter program will let me choose either Red Hat or WinXP to boot, right? And it'll do this without screwing up the MBRs for eachother... eh?

Yea that should be what's going to happen, disconnect the main drive and put the secondary drive on primary master when you install winxp, if you don't do it the winxp installer may complain.

Your code didn't work. I entered it into grub.conf exactly as you typed it. But when the boot menu comes up, and I choose WinXP, it says "incorrect drive." Anyone know of working code?? Note: I have two hard drives. Linux is on the master, WinXP is on the slave.

strange, in the grub menu press "C" to get in the prompt, type "root (hd" then press TAB, it should show you a list, do you see hd1 in there?