Mike McCarty wrote: >> My inclination would be to leave the Windows drive as primary master, >> make the Linux drive primary slave. Take care to install Linux only to >> primary slave (/dev/hdb) but have grub do it's thing automatically, >> which would over right the MBR on the primary master which would give >> you a grub boot choice of Linux or Windows. > > I agree. Also, if you have a floppy disc drive, it is helpful to set > up to boot GRUB off of the floppy and fiddle the configuration on the > floppy rather than the hard drive. When you get the floppy boot able > to boot both (presuming that you do) then that configuration can be > copied over to the hard drive. If it turns out that your machine doesn't > like for GRUB to boot WinXP, then you can try setting WinXP up to > boot GRUB. > > If possible, it's better to let GRUB manage the boot, but as I > mentioned, I found it easier to get WinXP to boot GRUB. If you > go to the GRUB website, you'll find that their opinion about the > fit between GRUB with Linux vs. its fit with Winxx is pretty much > the same as mine. In my opinion your advice is completely misconceived. Firstly, I imagine 95% of people already have Windows on their machines, and are now installing Linux. Assuming they are installing Fedora, I would say that if they simply follow the instructions on the disk, and install the boot-loader as recommended, that will work 95% of the time. You are inventing difficulties which simply do not arise in the vast majority of cases. It's actually quite a bad idea to change disks around during installation, as grub has a fixed idea of which disk is which (as described in /boot/grub/device.map). -- Timothy Murphy e-mail (<80k only): tim /at/ birdsnest.maths.tcd.ie tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366 s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland
