2 hard drives Dual boot?

**GroundZero3** · 02-06-2003, 04:53 PM

Thank to Pbharris i found this site. i have a problem. im currently enrolled into a unix class where we learn on Redhat

I have a spare 3.2 gig hard drive i would love to intall Mandrake 9 on. But i have winxp installed on to a 20 gig

i would like to have both hard drives in, and have a boot menu to choose between which hard drive i wanted to boot to. is this possible?

JaYsin

**pbharris** · 02-06-2003, 05:52 PM

Hi Ground!
sure , in fact this is the easy way because there is no need to repartition anything, the boot menu will be automatic and should have no issues booting mswinxp

**GroundZero3** · 02-06-2003, 05:53 PM

hey cool. so theres nothing i need to add to the boot.ini?

thanks great news

appericate it

**pbharris** · 02-06-2003, 06:22 PM

you can if you want XP to boot linux, but there is no need, at least i have had none.

**GroundZero3** · 02-06-2003, 06:31 PM

sounds good, thanks again. oh yah on techimo i messaged you. ignore it, after tinkering around looking for my NTFS parition i found it.

great site you have here

**GroundZero3** · 02-07-2003, 03:34 AM

okay i took out the 20 gig, install mandrake on the smaller drive and it worked like a charm. but theres a problem

when i turn on the machine, i make the 202 gig master, the 10 gig the slave on the same ide. I have it in the bios to boot to the 20 gig, i have enabled the options for mutiple operating systems in winxp but it directly boots into winxp.

the bios does see the 10 gig and the device manager does see the 10 gig

since i installed the 10 gig with out the 20 gig could that what be causeing the problem. i was reading around linux installs and alot of places talk about inserting a command line into the boot.ini?

thanks

JaYsin

**pbharris** · 02-07-2003, 05:19 AM

hello,
you can use that boot.ini option to boot into linux, there may be a problem with what you did here because it looks like you installed linux to the hard drive hda, and then moved it to hdb, for me my entries in /etc/fstab - where all the filesystems are listed has these hard coded, which may make things difficult, also LILO or Grub may be set up to have the small drive on hda too. there is a PET on booting linux using win2k here

9. Open up Windows explorer and set it to show all files. Go to the c:\ and find the file (it's a hidden file) boot.ini. Edit the boot.ini file, and at the bottom of the file C:\bootsect.lin=linux. Don't forget the quotes around Linux!!

i hope that helps, you will be able to fix it if it iss messed up, but this may be a bit tough...