[PLUG] Dual Boot - Two Drives

Chris Penwell romanmir_ug at comcast.net
Thu Aug 18 01:08:00 UTC 2005


Richard C. Steffens wrote:

> I'm about to try dual booting with separate drives for Win98SE and 
> SuSE 9.3. I've got SuSE loaded and working on the first drive. I'm 
> about to disconnect that drive and install Win98SE on the other drive, 
> so it can't try to do anything to the Linux drive. Once finished, I 
> want to be able to boot, through Grub, to either OS.
>
> Has anyone done this, and have any "gotcha's" to share?
>
> I assume there are some directions for how to configure Grub and will 
> go read those.
>
> Any recommendations on which drive should be the slave and which the 
> master on the IDE controller?
>
> Thanks for any advice.
>
    I have had overwhelming success with having a pre-existing windows 
XP install on one drive, and Linux (used to be Mandrake, now Kubuntu) on 
a completely separate drive.

    As I mentioned, I had the windows install pre-existing. When I 
installed Mandrake, it auto-detected the windows install and created an 
entry for it (in lilo,) automagically. Kunbuntu not so much. Had to 
convert from grub to lilo, which for me was kinda scary. But lilo seems 
to work.

    I think that having the windows side of things pre-existing might 
make your life a little easier; though I don't know the ins and outs of 
a Suse install. Also which ever HDD is gonna have linux on it should 
probably be the primary/master. You might be able to tell your BIOS 
which HDD to boot first however.

    Just my $.02 worth of experience.





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