I am trying set up a dual boot windows XP and ubunto linux. after many fail atemps I now have it were I have to go into the bios and turn off the SATA as a boot drive(turn off enhanced mode on disks)so it will boot from the IDE. I have a d865clg motherboard with a Pentium 4 an 4 gig of RAM. I have a SATA DVD RAM drive, a 500 gigabyte SATA hdd and two IDE hdd and a CD-ROM drive. What I want is a way of booting without having to mess with the BIOS. I tried putting GRUB on the 500 gig drive were windows lives but then I could not boot to either OS. I hade to do a load of XP and then recovery followed by fixboot and fixmbr to get my XP back. I have tried two other free boot loaders. one would load XP but not Linux, I got a panic something or other. I have tried to follow descriptions to make a boot disk for Linux, but I have no idea what I am doing. Some how it ends up being unmounted before I finish(reminds me of the old commodore days). I want to see if Linux will be a good alternative to XP that is just a poorly dressed windows 2000.
Any help would be great!

been a very long time since I duel booted windows but I'll give this a shot
when you installed grub on the windows drive did you get to the grub menu? You should be able to do it with your windows drive set as primary boot device with grub installed on it. You probably didn't have your menu.lst configured right.
in ubuntu run blkid to get the uuid of your linux partition and change the ########### below to that number or you can use root (hd1,0) or what ever the partition number is

default 0
timeout 10
title Ubuntu 9.04, kernel 2.6.28-11-generic
uuid ###############
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.28-11-generic root=UUID=########### ro
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.28-11-generic

title Other operating systems:
root
# on /dev/sda1
title Micro$oft Window$
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
savedefault
makeactive
chainloader +1

makoshark:

Q--"I tried putting GRUB on the 500 gig drive were windows lives but then I could not boot to either OS. I hade to do a load of XP and then recovery followed by fixboot and fixmbr to get my XP back."--

Clue:

Usual procedure is--

1. Install windows xp first because this lame OS needs to be at primary partition.
2. Then use the ubuntu live cd installer to install ubuntu linux.
3. Along ubuntu installation Grub is automatically installed at the MBR. This means upon next reboot it is ubuntu only. Just let it alone until linux is completely running and ready.
4. At the ubuntu terminal enter this--

makoshark@host-$: sudo gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst <Enter> <Give password if needed>

at the editor add this line to the bottom below "## ## End Default Options ##":

title Window XP
root (hd0,0)
makeactive
chainloader +1

Save the menu.lst then close.
Reboot. You should have dialogue box offering options which OS to boot up.

You may read this page also; http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...d.php?t=240181

To get familiar with Grub read: http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/grub.html

Check back how it goes.

Hope this helps.

Goodluck.

Well I am going nucking futs This Is my third day with linux um ubuntu and I have invested much time setting up ubuntu (what is a ubuntu?). I really don't want to reinstall, it took too many prictice runs (9) to get it formated correctly and installed. did it manually finally. My grub is installed on IDE drive 0 and xp on SATA 0. lunux boot is on IDE drive 0 partition 3, 4, 5, and 6. When drive boot BIOS config set to enhanced drive 3 becomes drive 0 and IDE 0 becomes 1 and so forth. I am thinking the easy way to do this is to boot from CD-ROM with grub on the CD? Then I could leave my BIOS alone and just pop in a cd, but not a rescue CD. So How do I make Linux bootable with grub? also the motherboard the I have is an d865glc with 4 hard drives with a CD-ROM and CD-RAM if this helps?

Thanks

Well it all turned out to be a lack of knowledge about how my BIOS looks at my hard drives. I thought the BIOS only gave SATA support on and off, but I found another setting were I could leave the SATA in and bot to the IDE first. then it was a mater of hacking the mune.lst till it worked.