Mandrake on primary HD, Win on secondary, dual boot?
 

Ok well apparantly when you install Mandrake 9.1 it doesn't let you choose a secondary hard drive, at least I didn't see how and online I couldn't find out how. I just switched harddrives and now I have Mandrake on my primary hard drive and Windows ME on my secondary hard drive.. I want to dual boot though and I have no idea where to begin.. I know I need to do something with LILO but I don't know what.

Heres info that may be important, I'm not sure:
Hard drive with windows:
New devfs device: ‎/dev/ide/host0/bus2/target0/lun0/disc
Old device file: ‎/dev/hde

Harddrive with Mandrake:
New devfs device: ‎/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/disc
Old device file: ‎/dev/hda

I wasn't sure which of those lines, if either, was important, but there they are anyways.

Can anyone help me setup a dual boot system here? In detail, because I'm one extreme :newbie:

Welcome to LQ :)

Well, windoze cannot stand to be second, you either need to swap the drives back, or you need to trick windoze into thinking it's first. This can be done with the map= lines in lilo.
So just below your entry for win in your /etc/lilo.conf file add this:
Remember to run lilo after to save the changes, then reboot.

Your other option is to swap drives back and install to the MBR of your first drive. You'll need to go into rescue mode to do this since the MBR will be confused after the drive swap. To get into rescue mode:
Plop in your Mandrake install CD, and when you "press enter to continue or F1 for help" press F1, type "rescue" without the quotes and follow the instructions to re-install LILO to the MBR.

Cool

I have a question here. If I want to install windows onto the first harddisk and Linux on the second, is the Linux installation process able to install Linux onto /dev/hdb (second harddisk) and is it able to put the lilo to the MBR or the first harddisk?
Thanks:)

Sure is. Linux doesn't really care which partition it's installed to, as long as the root and image are correct in lilo, it will be happy to install anywhere. As for in the MBR, sure, it's at the top portion of your lilo.conf file. The device is listed, to install to the MBR it should list as /dev/hda (assuming a standard drive layout).

Cool

i'd always recommend putting linux on the master and swapping them in the bios like masterc suggested. this way, if you're not too hot on linux, removing it entirely is simply a case of physically changing the drives back, as the mbr is not on the same drive as the windows machine.

Hello Chris. I undertood that the windows should be on the "primary" disk when booting, so the MBR is likely to be put on the disk where windows resides. When swap the order in BIOS, accordingly I need to do the physical exchange. Is that right?
Thank you.

What he's suggesting is to physically move your drives, if you can do this from within the bios, all the better. However, do whatever you need to do to get your hdb be your windoze drive. Then, in the event you want to switch back, you don't have to worry about fixing the MBR at all, you simply physically switch the drives back and there is virtually no evidence of linux.

HTH

Cool

Oh, thanks a lot. Master:)
By putting the windows as hdb, you mean by installing Linux boot loader to hda? Consequently either harddisk has its own bootloader: hda has LILO, hdb has NTLDR (win2000). By switching windows disk to the "prime", it utilizes NTLDR, and Linux turns behind the door. Is that correct?

Hi Xdude

Just put Windows on your primary master drive and Linux on your primary slave or secondary master.

Linux recognises drives like this:

primary master..................../dev/hda
primary slave......................./dev/hdb

secondary master.............../dev/hdc
secondary slave.................../dev/hdd


Install Windows first then Linux second - when installing Linu x you'll get a choice as to where you want to install it to - in your case it will be either

/dev/hdb or
/dev/hdc

depnding on whther you want it on the primary slave or secondary master.

In a nutshell, it sure is :)

Cool

Well what I ended up doing was leaving the linux drive as primary and I just went into the Mandrake Control Center and found where you configure LILO and added the other harddrive, now it works fine. Thanks though.

Sweet deal :)

Glad to hear you got it all working.

Cool

Congrats Xdude