Hi

I've got two hard drives, one with Windows Server 2003, and the other with Suse Linux 8.1.

When I installed both OSs I didn't have the other hard drive connected.
I want to know if there is a easy way to dual boot it? I've got the Windows hd as master, and the Linux as slave.

If there isn't a easy way, then what is the hard way?

bb_mat at pcformat.co.za told me to come and ask here.

He also replied me with this

There isn't really an easy way as such.

If your Windows drive is master - /dev/hda and your Suse is slave - /dev/hdb then this is what you could do :-

Find your SuSe boot disk or rescue disk - I think you'd have to use a rescue disk, as your SuSe boot disk would most likely be looking for linux on /dev/hda1

With the rescue disk, try and mount the harddrive with Suse on (/dev/hdb1 ?)

Then you'll have to edit lilo and add in entries for windows and the new location of your Suse and also tell lilo to write that data to the MBR of /dev/hda

Can anyone give me additional instructions?

swap your drives

mkdir /mnt/windows (or whatever you want)
add to /etc/fstab a new line:edit /etc/lilo.conf to include extra stanzarun /sbin/lilo

reboot. You should have linux and windows available and mountable under Linux. Good luck.
BTW, I have wrote on this a lot here (and I know little compared to most). If you want to know why I think this is best way, go through my older posts about it. I think it has the least impact (more scalable this way) on the system as a whole.

its a easy,

I am assuming that when you installed linux the linux disk was the master i.e hda, and then you removed the linux disk or made it the secondary disk and intalled windows. If this is true then you have two separate bootable disks both which think they were the master disk.

what you need to do is install the linux disk so that is is as it was when you installed linux.
boot into linux and edit /etc/grub.conf

add an entry for windows. like thus:

title WINXP
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
map (hd0) (hd1)
map (hd1) (hd0)
chainloader +1


I am going from memory here so sintax could be slightly wrong. some google searching should see you right though. What the above does is tells grub to swap the two harddrives when ever windows is loaded, this works because windows uses the bios to access the disk.


Actullay you can test if this is going to work by just swapping the disks (linux primary windows secondary) and the using the bios to boot from the second harddisk (windows) if that works the the grub fix will.

hope this helps
Peter

just an addition to peter's suggestion:
make sure that after you edit your
/etc/grub.conf
you run /sbin/grub-install
to install the boot loader. ive had to do this
a couple of times and it has always worked