I'm sure this has been done before but my next linux expedition is to try and dual boot SuSE 10 and Windows XP Pro off of 2 different harddrives, a master and a slave. I tried the old "Switch it in the bios" and XP runs fine. However linux errors out asking for the second hdd. (at least that's what I believe is happening after it asked for "dev/hda2" and didn't find it....) Just to make things perfectly clear the windows drive is the master and the linux drive is the slave.

dev/hda2 is the second partition on the primary drive, did you by change happen to have physically swapped the drives after you installed linux?

Linux can run on any drive and doesn't care about being on the first disk. So if its on the second leave it there if however it thinks it was installed on the first, there maybe problems. You can fix these using recovery mode ( Altering where grub thinks things are and changing fstab ).

If it is on the first disk leave it and boot Windows with grub swapping the drives for windows. Saves all the messing with the BIOS.

More details would be great, have you moved disks what the layout of the actual drives are, etc.

Okay, when I initialy installed linux I installed it on my 30g HD. At the time of install there was no other drives hooked up. I then hooked up a 40g HD and installed XP on that. I've now got them in a master/slave configuration in which the linux drive is the slave and the windows drive is the master. I'm still a little noobish with linux so when you say "Recovery Mode" you mean the thing on the linux install disk?

Yes or a Knoppix disk. Then you'll probably have to reinstall grub so its looking at the right disk, and alter the configuration file for grub in /boot/grub/menu.lst so anything that says /dev/hdaX say /dev/hdbX. Then alter the /etc/fstab file and do the same thing. There is an alternative though...

Swap the drives so Linux is the master again. Boot into Linux, and add a section to the /boot/grub/menu.lst file at the bottom for Windows something like:

This will automatically swap the drives for you and boot windows so you don't have to mess with the BIOS.

Okay great! Thanks alot for the help! There was one problam in the my boot virus detector thought the script that linux ran was a virus but that's been taken care of. Thanks again.


Oh and btw. Would windows being installed on the slave HD have make it run differently? It seems that it runs a little slower than it does when set to master.

It shouldn't make any real difference. If the master is a CD, DVD drive I have had that slow some things down. but to be honest that was rarely noticable.

Since windows is running the show when its booted the linux disk basically sits there doing nothing, so The windows disk should have all the bandwidth to itself.