This should be easy. I had an NTFS formatted hard disk (hd1) start to fail on me and decided now was the time to convert to Linux. I can't completely give up WinXP because of some of the programs the rest of my family needs for which there is no Linux substitute. My plan is to eventually move WinXP into a VMware virtual machine on top of Linux (have been doing that for several years to perform os hardening and other security-related activities). For now, I need to dual-boot, while I get Linux all ready to go. I successfully backed up all the data on the old NTFS formatted disk (hd1) and pulled it out. There are still programs and data on the remaining good drive (hd0) that must be kept until I can move them into the virtual machine. Bought a new 320 GB EIDE disk and installed it as MASTER and moved the previous MASTER (a 160 GB EIDE disk that booted WinXP) to SLAVE. That made the old hd0 hd1 and the new disk hd0. Without any OS installed on the new hd0, the machine continued to boot WinXP from hd1. I installed Fedora 7 on hd0 F7 and it successfully boots. However, when I try to tell grub (through the grub menu) to boot the "other" OS, it echos the last line "chainloader +1" and dies. Apparently it can't find the WinXP boot loader in the MBR of hd1. When I disconnect the cable from the new hd0 and power back up, WinXP boots. When I reconnect the drive and power back up, Linux boots. I can force this behavior in the BIOS by removing the new hd from the boot device list. Several years ago, I had RH Linux 7.2 in a dual-boot mode with Win NT 4.0, but it was all on one hd, each os with their own partition(s), one MBR, all managed by lilo. That install went mostly automatic and I didn't have to tweak any settings in the BIOS or lilo...it all just worked. I've looked at a bunch of dual-boot guidance but I'm not finding what I need to deal with two separate hd each with their own os and MBR. Maybe it is there, I'm just not understanding it. This should be easy...what do I need to do to get grub to chainload WinXP on hd1? Copies of /boot/grub.conf and output from df and parted are provided below. The only change I made to grub.conf was to up the timeout from 5 to 10 seconds. BTW, it is interesting to me that the drives are physically EIDE but the output of df and parted show them as scsi. I expected to see them as hda and hdb, not sda and sdb. Why is that? # grub.conf generated by anaconda # # Note that you do not have to rerun grub after making changes to this file # NOTICE: You have a /boot partition. This means that # all kernel and initrd paths are relative to /boot/, eg. # root (hd0,0) # kernel /vmlinuz-version ro root=/dev/sda6 # initrd /initrd-version.img #boot=/dev/sda default=0 timeout=10 splashimage=(hd0,0)/grub/splash.xpm.gz hiddenmenu title Fedora (2.6.22.4-65.fc7) root (hd0,0) kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.22.4-65.fc7 ro root=LABEL=/ rhgb quiet initrd /initrd-2.6.22.4-65.fc7.img title Fedora (2.6.21-1.3194.fc7) root (hd0,0) kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.21-1.3194.fc7 ro root=LABEL=/ rhgb quiet initrd /initrd-2.6.21-1.3194.fc7.img title Other rootnoverify (hd1,0) chainloader +1 [root@ldesk ~]# df Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on /dev/sda6 121154164 2805868 112094596 3% / /dev/sda2 158708240 193800 150322496 1% /home /dev/sda1 101086 17245 78622 18% /boot tmpfs 777248 0 777248 0% /dev/shm /dev/sda3 19840924 274004 18542780 2% /var [root@ldesk ~]# [root@ldesk sbin]# parted -l Model: ATA WDC WD3200AAJB-0 (scsi) Disk /dev/sda: 320GB Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B Partition Table: msdos Number Start End Size Type File system Flags 1 32.3kB 107MB 107MB primary ext3 boot 2 107MB 168GB 168GB primary ext3 3 168GB 189GB 21.0GB primary ext3 4 189GB 320GB 131GB extended 5 189GB 192GB 3142MB logical linux-swap 6 192GB 320GB 128GB logical ext3 Model: ATA WDC WD1600JB-98G (scsi) Disk /dev/sdb: 160GB Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B Partition Table: msdos Number Start End Size Type File system Flags 1 32.3kB 80.0GB 80.0GB primary ntfs boot 2 80.0GB 160GB 80.0GB primary ntfs Dave McGuffey Principal Information System Security Engineer SAIC, IISBU, Columbia, MD 410.865.7972 (w)
