At the moment I have to manually dual boot by swiching first boot device in the bios, and i shall tell you why:
I have an nForce2 board that has serial ata. MSI Promise to provide the controller. Specifically, it is a pdc20376. So windows is installed on this [blazingly fast WD Raptor] drive, and and boots when I choose SCSI as first boot device.

Even though I rather wanted to install linux on a second partition on the sata drive, it seems i am out of luck with drivers, so i put it on my master ide device and it is happily mapped to /dev/hda.

Now for the thing of it: nonsurprisingly ntloader does not boot to the linux partition. (after following the generally known method of copying the bootsector to windows and putting it in boot.ini. It just freezes at "GRUB." And yes, /boot is before the 1024 mark.

So that leaves dual booting in the hands of grub. The only problem is, from what i've seen, grub only words with (hdx) and (hdx,x) style devices. i've heard somehow scsi devices get mapped to these, and i've tried several.

does anyone know how to make grub boot boot windows? I'm a bit new to linux and i'm trying to decide where the problem is. I don't think this is a driver problem (because this is low level stuff here. the bios knows how to do it, why can't grub?!). anyhow, any help would be loved. thank you. especially for reading this long post.

I haven't worked with a SCSI/Serial ATA setting like you have but I've found a third party boot software to be the best solution. It saves me a lot of headache.

You can download a trial version of Acronis' OS Selector. That's the one I ended up buying because it worked really good for me. Look it up at www.acronis.com . Of course, there are a bunch of others you can check out too.

Hope this helps....

Anjan

Before you do that, try to tell grub to boot one system from /dev/hda1 and the other from /dev/sda1 (adapt these numbers if necessary). /dev/sdaX are the partitions on your first SCSI drive, like /dev/hdaX are the partitions of your primary IDE master drive.

I've not tried this myself, but I would be very surprised if grub couldn't handle scsi drives.

Let us know what happens!

Have you already installed GRUB on the MBR?

You can try this

boot into linux the way you have been doing. Make a GRUB boot floppy
with the following commands

cd /usr/share/grub/i386-pc
dd if=stage1 of=/dev/fd0 bs=512 count=1
dd if=stage2 of=/dev/fd0 bs=512 seek=1

You can get more information about GRUB by typing

info grub

at the bash prompt.

Try booting from the floppy

At the GRUB> prompt, type root(hd0,x) where x is your Windows partition
next type chainloader+1

See if it boots into Windows.

If it does, you can safely go back to booting linux your regular way. Then refer to "info grub" and read the Installation section to see how you can install GRUB on your MBR.

I have tried all the sd_ commands to no avail. Reading the documentation, it says that grub only support (hdx,x).

I hate to reiterate my point but using Acronis OS Selector (which is certified by SuSE for their distro) will make it a lot easier...

hehe, no, your reiteration just places emphasis.
i'm going to be gone for 2 days, but when i get back i'll try the acronis. real quick before i leave though i'm going to try the grub floppy method

Alright, well on an exciting note, i noticed (as i had not before) that grub sees a "hd1" and since there are only two hd's, one ide (hd0, linux) and hd1, windows.

However, after "grub> root (hd1,0)" told me it was an unrecognized type (which i would expect, being ntfs), i did "chainloader +1" and there is a 1/20th second change in the cursor and then it just gives me another grub prompt. grub is pretty good about returning after a failure, so i think that is what this is.

so grub does technically see the partition, its just not... getting to it. anyone have ideas?!!

instead of root (hd1,0), try rootnoverify(hd1,0) and then chainloader+1