cannot dual boot suse 9.1 and winxp between sata and ide respectively

jarobman · 01-09-2005, 06:51 PM

Here is my situation:

I cannot effectively dual boot suse and winxp. I have winxp installed on my 40 Gig ide drive and suse installed on my 160 Gig sata drive. I am not given an option to boot into suse when my ide drive has a higher boot priority. When I try to boot windows with my sata drive having a higher boot priority, GRUB gives me the following message:

root (hd2, 0)

Error 21: Selected disk does not exist

I have tried tinkering with menu.lst (which I probably shouldn't be doing) to no avail. I have not seen any similar situations in any other threads, so I have no choice but to post this one. Any insights would be greatly appreciated.

keyfitter · 01-09-2005, 09:09 PM

I am new to this butmy guess is that dual boot may not work when one of the drives
is not an IDE drive. You may have to get another IDE drive or install SuSE on the same drive with Windows. I did it in a laptop with a 20 gig hard drive. The only thing to be careful of is not to let SuSE format the whole drive and clean off your Windows. It did
it to me on the first try. I reinstalled Windows and used Partition Magic to create an
Ext2 Linux partition. SuSE went right to it.

gd2shoe · 01-10-2005, 02:18 AM

You should feel free to tinker with menu.lst . The best way to tinker with it is to leave most of it alone, and just add to the end of it. If you make a mistake this way, it won't cost you a head-ache.

Let me see, are you sure that your Windows disk is the Secondary Master (instead of primary master)? You are trying to boot secondary master, first partition.

(hd0,0) is first partition, primary master; (hd0,2) is third partition, primary master; (hd2,0) is first partition, secondary master

You might want to check in Linux in "cat /proc/partitions" to make sure that hdc1 exists. The output of this may prove helpful in understanding how your bios presents the drives.

I'd be interested to see which root devices your menu.lst uses (where does it see SuSE for example).

jarobman · 01-10-2005, 11:07 AM

Quote:

are you sure that your Windows disk is the Secondary Master (instead of primary master)? You are trying to boot secondary master, first partition.

My windows disk is the primary master and my cd writer/dvd rom is the secondary master.

Quote:

(hd0,0) is first partition, primary master; (hd0,2) is third partition, primary master; (hd2,0) is first partition, secondary master

The weird thing about my suse installation is since it was installed with my sata drives having the topmost boot priority (besides floppy) it is assigned to (hd0,0) or hda, my second disk in my raid array is assigned to (hd1,0) or hdc and my primary master is assigned to (hd2,0) or hde. I can read the stuff from my primary master when I log in to suse and explore the directory, but when I try to boot up, GRUB won't let me and says it doesn't exist. I have no clue why I have no hdb.

The only solution I see if this problem is unsolvable is to partition my sata drive to hold both windows and suse and wipe my primary master clean. The only flaw with this method is that I will have to reinstall everything that I have on windows. The last time I had to reinstall everything, it almost took a month (this was during a school term, at about this time of year)! So, I would very much prefer to solve this little problem rather than go through all that trouble to reinstall everything. Thanks for the input so far!

gd2shoe · 01-10-2005, 01:41 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by jarobman
My windows disk is the primary master and my cd writer/dvd rom is the secondary master.

The weird thing about my suse installation is since it was installed with my sata drives having the topmost boot priority (besides floppy) it is assigned to (hd0,0) or hda, my second disk in my raid array is assigned to (hd1,0) or hdc and my primary master is assigned to (hd2,0) or hde. I can read the stuff from my primary master when I log in to suse and explore the directory, but when I try to boot up, GRUB won't let me and says it doesn't exist. I have no clue why I have no hdb.
....

Yes, I consider that weird. Normally, systems work this way:

(hd1) is NOT secondary master, it is primary slave - /dev/hdb
(hd2) is NOT /dev/hde, it is secondary master - /dev/hdc

primary master - (hd0)
primary slave - (hd1)
secondary master - (hd2)
secondary slave - (hd3)
other drives - (hda4) and so on

In other words:
hda - (hd0)
hdb - (hd1)
hdc - (hd2)
hdd - (hd3)
hde - (hd4)
hdf - (hd5)
hdg - (hd6)

Try (hd4,0).

gd2shoe · 01-10-2005, 01:43 PM

By the way, Windows sometimes does not like to boot up if it's not booting from the primary master. You may need to trick it.

Code:

map (hd4) (hd0)
map (hd0) (hd4)
chainloader +1

jarobman · 01-10-2005, 01:51 PM

Quote:

Try (hd4,0)

I tried that, but it doesn't work and it reverts back to (hd2,0).

Quote:

By the way, Windows sometimes does not like to boot up if it's not booting from the primary master. You may need to trick it.

code:

map (hd4) (hd0)
map (hd0) (hd4)
chainloader +1

I tried that too but it doesn't work. Actually, I tried that with (hd2) instead of (hd4).

jarobman · 01-11-2005, 11:06 PM

I have finally given up. I have successfully installed xp and suse on my sata drive and I still have my original xp on my primary master. I can dual boot suse and my sata xp, but not my primary master xp. I will continue to use my primary master xp until i have installed everything on my sata xp. Then it's rm -rf /windows/E

. Thanks for the input everyone.