Hello all,
newbie here, so please forgive the question.
I have a pc that I put together myself, it has 2 sata disk in raid 0 configuration, with Win XP on them, working fine.
I then wanted to install linux (Mepis) on the machine but could not see the disk in Qparted, probably because of the raid (fakeraid?) configuration, so I decided to add a new hard drive and load linux on this one.
I added a new 200 GB HD, disconnected the other two disks, and partitioned the new disk for linux (100Gb) and left the rest partitioned as Fat32 so that i could use some space with Windows XP too. I then installed Mepis in this single hard disk.
Linux works ok, but I have to go into the bios and change the drivers sequence in order to switch from Linux to Windows and vice versa.
Is there a way to have the option to decide what system to boot at startup?
Thanks guys if you can help.

Lorenx

I dont know much abt Mepis, but if you using grub i think you can do it. In this case you have to add few entries in grub.conf.

If you using grub ..please paste the output of below command :

#cat /boot/grub/grub.conf

Hmm, you shouldn't have disconnected those disks, windows would have been autodetected, at least partially. And there isn't any need to use fat32 any longer. Linux at this stage reads/writes from/to ntfs just as well as XP. And fat 32 sucks. It fragments like sand it can't save files larger than 4GB (OK, few people have files that big but the more options the better).

You'll have to edit the menu.lst file in /boot/grub. What you probably need add at the bottom is (be sure to leave a blank line before it):

title Windows XP
map (hd0) (hd1)
map (hd1) (hd0)
rootnoverify (hd1,0)
chainload +1

That is, if your boot device (i.e. the Mepis disk) sits on the first disk and XP on the second one. You can check bios to find out whether that order is really correct. Also, bear in mind that this pointer to XP is what would be used on a non-raid system; your mileage may vary, as they say. I guess someone else will have to step in if it doesn't work.

Thanks for the replies guys,
let me correct myself, the extra partition I did is actually NTFS not FAT32, my mystake, anyway is just some empty space I reserved for XP just because I did not need 200GB to test try Linux. I might reformat that and install Ubuntu too at this point.

Then I must say that I too thought that having disconnected the 2 disks in raid might have prevented grub from seeing Windows, so I did install Mepis a second time, but this time with the other 2 disk attached.
I have to explain that one of the reason I disconnected the hard drives the first time was because all the 3 disks are exactly the same model and the same capacity and I did not want to risk to get confused creating a partition to accommodate Linux and ending up destroying my Windows installation In fact I noticed that QTparted was not recognising the 2 drives in raid as one unit, actually QTparted gives me a critical error when it checks the drives while GNOME Partition Editor manages to see the drives, but as three separate drives not two, so I assume that Windows XP is not detected for the same reason. (..maybe the raid used in my motherboard is not supported by Linux )
Anyway even after the second installation Windows was not picked up in GRUB.

I have now edited the menu.lst file as adviced by jay73, and for a few seconds I thought that was it, but on selecting the now available option for XP, I was showed another GRUB screen, blue this time and not green, and selecting Windows XP again would just do nothing.
Maybe there is a way to add a bootloader to the disk with Windows XP that point to Linux on the second disk? Or is there a fix so that linux can finally see the 2 disks in raid as one and understand that there is Windows XP installed somewhere?

By the way I am using simply mepis 6.5 64 and my motherboard is an ASROCK 939SLI32-eSATA2