I have a minor problem that, at first, I thought was a disaster. I have an HP nc6400 Core 2 Duo laptop with an 80GB internal drive with my IT corporate WinXP load on it. I added another 80GB drive in the Multibay II where the DVD is normally and have the DVD connected via USB. I partitioned the MBII drive into 40GB for a non-IT WinXP and the remaining 40GB for Linux. I was looking for the Linux that would support the most feature out of the box. CentOS 5 didn't work with the display, but I could get GRUB only to mess with the MBII drive and leave my IT load alone.

I got Ubuntu 7.04 to boot and work with everything on the laptop so I decided to install it. I was careful to manually partition the 40GB on the MBII drive as the only place to load Ubuntu. It installed fine except that the boot record was modified on the internal IT drive leaving the menu.lst file on the Ubuntu partition. As long as I have the internal drive boot first, I see the Grub boot menu and can pick Ubuntu, or either of the 2 WinXP loads.

The problem is that I want to pull out the MBII drive sometimes and just use the internal drive for business that only needs my WinXP IT load. I can't do that because the menu.lst is not present if the MBII drive is pulled.

I'd like to fix the internal drive back to normal where WinXP boots with no options. Then have the MBII drive with the boot record modified so it uses Grub when it's booted. That way the IT load is the default boot unless the MBII drive is inserted, then I get the Grub menu just for the Ubuntu and the non-WinXP options.

Can one of you smart folks tell me how to pull myself out of this one??

Jim A.

I did up a nice long response to this, but thinking about it, the easiest is to set the BIOS boot order as "USB (DVD) > MBII > Internal disk", and do the install again. It'll see the MBII as disk zero, and all should just fall into place.
You could just try doing grub, but fstab will be wrong unless you use UUID.

After you're happy everything works as advertised, change the BIOS boot order back, and boot the XP CD - hit <r> to get into recovery console, and run fixmbr.
Reboot.

Thanks for your help. I got the MBR fixed, but I think this is going to require some more experimenting.

Jim A

i hate UUID, i think Ubuntu screwed up implementing that in their distro...

Since it appears you can boot from your USB DVD drive, install grub to a blank CDR/DVDR(or if you have an internal floppy drive on your laptop, you could do it to floppy). This will keep you from messing around with the *company's* OS and mbr.

If you want to boot Linux, you simply hook up your Linux MBII disk, boot the grub disk you made (floppy or CDR), choose Linux, and run it. In the event you don't need access to grub, and want to go "straight to Windows".. You simply don't boot the disk, and thus Grub never gets loaded.

Only issue I could see doing it this way, is if you have a kernel upgrade, you'll have to manually point to it on your disk.

http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/4622

IGF

This morning I tried another way. I pulled my internal drive and installed Ubuntu 7.04 from the USB DVD to the Mutlibay II 80GB drive in the "normal DVD position".

Once that was complete, I reinstalled my internal drive. I have the internal drive boot first for normal use, and use the F9 boot selector when I want Ubuntu.

Jim A