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Dual-booting w/removable drive?

post #1 of 9
1/3/04 at 2:01pm
Thread Starter 
Okay, maybe I'm just not thinking this through clearly enough.

Here's what I've got:

A Sager 5680 with two drives:
Primary (nonremovable) drive: Windows XP, entire drive.
Secondary (removable) drive: Redhat and a FAT32 partition full of MP3s.


When I first installed RH on the 2ndary drive, all was fine. I was using GRUB to multiboot, and it just worked. Then came the day I needed to use my floppy drive. So, out went the 2ndary drive, in went the floppy.

Suddenly, I couldn't boot anymore. Seems that the boot sector on the primary drive was rewritten by GRUB (as expected), but it pointed to the 2ndary drive, and thus couldn't load its config info, and I couldn't tell it to boot from the primary drive.


What I'd like:
Some way (without resorting to a boot CD every time I want to switch OSes) that I can dual-boot into Windows or Linux with the current drive config, but not have the system become unusable when I take out the 2ndary hard drive.

Suggestions?
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post #2 of 9
1/3/04 at 5:25pm
I think what you need here is a small partition at the start of the primary drive that acts like the boot partition - this is where you will install grub and it will get all its config info. Sorry Im not much more help - this is why I like lilo more than grub
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post #3 of 9
1/3/04 at 5:52pm
Thread Starter 
No worries, Bratag. I actually just came up with another solution.

I burned a SuSE boot CD, went into rescue mode, managed to mount and chroot my Linux partitions, configure and install LILO, make a copy of the boot sector, copy it onto one of my 128MB USB drives, boot back into windows, and use the WinXP NTLDR and that bootsector to boot into RedHat, instead.

I was trying to avoid having to rearrange my partitions. Looks like I just succeeded. Now I can finally get around to getting the wireless card in this 5680 working under Linux!

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post #4 of 9
1/3/04 at 9:18pm
Thread Starter 
Quote:
Originally Posted by mcl

I was trying to avoid having to rearrange my partitions. Looks like I just succeeded. Now I can finally get around to getting the wireless card in this 5680 working under Linux!
Well, done with that now, too (using ndiswrapper). Next: sound.
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post #5 of 9
1/4/04 at 2:07pm
Good work my young apprentice
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post #6 of 9
1/4/04 at 5:37pm
How about just copying the .bin of your rh boot sector to the ntfs partition and modify the boot.ini and use NTLDR. It saves you from having to have the usb drive all the time. I at one time had one machine running LILO calling NTLDR, one running NTLDR calling lilo, one NTLDR calling grub and one Grub calling NTLDR. I find on a system that runs win on the the primary partition/drive NTLDR is easier to work with calling your favorite linux boot loader. On this machine I have NTLDR calling Grub. If it works it works ya know. So many different ways of doing things. That's what's fun.
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post #7 of 9
1/4/04 at 6:57pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by bsmith
How about just copying the .bin of your rh boot sector to the ntfs partition and modify the boot.ini and use NTLDR.
This is exactly what I did on my Gentoo/XP set-up. This way, XP has absolutely no clue of the Gentoo installation, nor will it ever since the MBR is untouched by Gentoo. Plus, this sort of keeps the bootloader menu cleaner as I only have two options with NTLoader: Windows or Gentoo. If I choose Gentoo, Grub fires up on the Gentoo partition and presents me with the various boot options I have. The only down side to this is that you have to remember to update the .bin file on your Windows partition every time you update Grub.
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post #8 of 9
1/4/04 at 9:29pm
Ahh I read it as that you were still using the usb drive. I see now.
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post #9 of 9
1/5/04 at 2:27pm
Thread Starter 
Quote:
Originally Posted by bsmith
How about just copying the .bin of your rh boot sector to the ntfs partition and modify the boot.ini and use NTLDR. It saves you from having to have the usb drive all the time. I at one time had one machine running LILO calling NTLDR, one running NTLDR calling lilo, one NTLDR calling grub and one Grub calling NTLDR. I find on a system that runs win on the the primary partition/drive NTLDR is easier to work with calling your favorite linux boot loader. On this machine I have NTLDR calling Grub. If it works it works ya know. So many different ways of doing things. That's what's fun.
Err...well, that's what I did. I used the USB drive to get the boot sector over from Linux to Windows, since RH9 doesn't natively support NTFS, and with two drives in a 5680, you can't use the floppy.
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