On Saturday September 23 2006 3:09 pm, Joel Rees wrote: > Then why the argument? Wouldn't it be better to post a mini-tutorial > about how you have set up your successful dual-booting master-slave > configurations? No argument intended, just a strong rebuttal to your very strong statements once you admitted what they were based on. I search a lot on lists like this for solutions. Threads like this are not just read currently, but by many others as time goes on, who are searching for solutions. If you were on to something, I really did want to know. Once it was clear that you weren't, I wanted to make sure that was clear, that's all. Now, as to your request. There's not much to it. You can almost always find a legend on modern drives that tells you where the jumpers should go. If you hook two drives to the same controller with a three connector cable, you'll almost always be safe by jumpering one drive as slave, and one drive as master. There is also cable select - if you have a cable select cable, which will usually have markings near the connectors saying Master and Slave silkscreened right on the ribbon cable, then, you can also jumper BOTH drives as CS or cable select. There are some on this list that will insist that this is an invitation to disaster, but I've done it many times without incident. I have discovered problems where others have jumpered one drive as CS and the other as Master or Slave, and that creates all kinds of issues, including drives appearing then disappearing, sometimes recognized, other times not, erratic behavior - just had such a case this week. Also, most modern IDE drives now require 80 wire cables, which are not the same as the old standard 40 wire ribbons - the individual wires are much thinner, and there obviously are more of them. You must make sure you use these. Once you've set your drives up, you can start with installing Windows, then install your Linux distros. There are lots of tutorials out there for how to do that, and many ways of doing it. There's one you can google up pretty easily which has a Windows, a DOS, and something like 16 flavors of Linux, running on one machine - I'm not sure why, but it proves the principle. There are some on this list who've found it easier to use the Windows bootloader to offer choices of what system to boot into, and assert that is more failsafe. I haven't done it, so I can't comment. But, I currently run about 7 Linux boxes, and they are all dual-boot with Windows XP. I've set up several triple boot machines, and had one machine for awhile with 4 different OS's on it. I've never encountered a problem I couldn't solve in this respect with Google - there's lots of howtos and other info out there - googling "windows linux mutliboot" will start one off with a lot of hits. Multi-booting without Windows but with multiple versions of Linux is not so much different, and all questions can be answered with google... -- Claude Jones Brunswick, MD, USA
