Maximum PC

Lets start collecting stuff here, and then I will update this post once we have created a "guide".

Articles and Guides

• Multi-Booting Guide by Skilless
• Linux Dev-Center - Dual Booting
• HowToForge: Dual Boot Xp/Vista and Ubuntu Fiesty
• After you have your dual boot set up, share you application data!

Exhaustive Linux and Windows Dual-booting article
Thanks to Kleinkinstein for bringing us the URL

The definitive dual-booting guide: Windows 7, Linux, Vista and XP step-by-step. The "how to" set up your PC to dual-boot between Windows 7, Linux, XP or Vista! A complete step-by-step guide with screenshots. One of the best things about this article is that it shows how to boot from each system to another system. Such as...

- How to dual boot Linux and Windows XP (Linux installed first)
- How to dual boot Vista and XP (with Vista installed first)
- How to dual boot Windows XP and Linux (XP installed first)
- How to dual-boot Vista with Linux (with Linux installed first)
- How to dual-boot Vista with Linux (Vista installed first)
- How to dual-boot Vista with XP (with XP installed first)
- How to dual boot Windows Vista and Windows 7 (Vista installed first)
- How to dual boot Windows XP and Windows 7 (XP installed first)

...enjoy!

LINK

Other MPC threads with good information
http://www.maximumpc.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=676429
Install Fiesty Fawn on a USB drive - http://www.maximumpc.com/forums/viewtop ... highlight=

Always make the windows drive as master.

Then install grub on the master's MBR, and let it chainload XP.

This will work for a single or dual hard drive system.

You guys suggest I add it to boot.ini...


Its sda or Primary. But it was disconnected when installing XP.

NMI...

what do you have on your system now? You have XP on the primary hard drive, and then a secondary drive that you wish to install linux to?

All you have to do is install Linux, choose partitions (or create them) on the secondary drive when prompted to in the Linux installer. You should be asked if you want to install grub (or lilo) to the primary MBR, and you should say "yes". Linux is pretty good at automatically configuring it's bootloader to hand off to XP when you choose that option at boot up.

i have a triple boot - ubuntu, vista & XP

each with their own hard drive (sata3).

the trick was to load xp on a hard drive, load vista on the second & then swap the sata ports between the third hard drive and the one with vista to install linux on what it thinks is SDA (hard drive #1).

i don't really like the result tho

grub has the different updated kernels and the vista/longhorn loader & under the vista loader is xp - so every time i wanna use xp, i have to navigate boot menus

the other methods i've tried for triple booting across multiple HD's resulted in killdisc and once needing a flashed bios (it gets ugly quick)

most guides are how to install on one hard drive & i have been unable to get the right keywords in www.google.com/linux for (greater than dual) booting and chain loading on multiple (greater than 2) hard drives

so there's an idea for your guide and a messy solution for it

See... theres the problem.

Windows = Secondary HDD

Windows installed with Primary Fedora 7 HDD DISCONNECTED

Yeah so Fedora 7 was already installed... but Windows took over... if you get what I am trying to say?

Two options, re-install grub or try this:

http://www.geocities.com/epark/linux/gr ... HOWTO.html

Well, I could give an exhaustive answer to this, but time is short right now, so I'll give some brief information...
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Multi-OS Installation:

1. Have a Partitioning scheme set on paper ahead of time.

I would strongly recommend a partition for /boot, since this may come to service multiple OSs over time and you want to keep this separate from / (root directory) for future use or reference. For all of my linux installs after the primary, I tend to create two partitions/directories, one for / and one for /home.

2. Backup all of your data you wish to retain. This is a no brainer, right?

3. Install Windows first, and put it on the first drive and the first partition, that Windows recognizes. You can look at the hidden files in what becomes C:\ once Windows is installed and look for the boot file that describes how Windows will load. Write down this information, it is important.

4. Come to understand how GRUB sees drives/partitions differs from how fdisk (et al) sees drives/partitions. For example; say you have two drives in your system, a SATA drive (sda) and a EIDE drive (hda). The SATA drive is set as the first bootable device. GRUB sees the SATA drive as hd0 and the EIDE drive as hd1. All subsequent partitions on the drives start with zero (0), like so;

sda1 = (hd0,0)
sda2 = (hd0,1)

hda1 = (hd1,0)
hda2 = (hd1,1)

5. Each physical drive can have only 4 primary partitions, and infinite (I think) logical drives. All of the logical drives *must* be contained within a single primary drive, called an extended partition, which has a size equal to the all of the logical partitions contained within it (give or take a few MB). All logical drives also start numerating at 5, like so;

sda1 (hd0,0) = primary partition - 12GB
sda2 = extended partition - 108GB (the primary partition which acts as a container for the logical partitions)
. . sda5 (hd0,4) = logical partition - 52GB
. . sda6 (hd0,5) = logical partition - ~56GB

hda1 (hd1,0) = primary partition - 100MB (mount to /boot, and make it a "bootable" partition)
hda2 (hd1,1) = primary partition - 512MB (swap)
hda3 (hd1,2) = primary partition - 16GB (mount to / )
hda4 = extended partition - 195GB (Note that the size of all of the logical partitions combined must be a subset of the extended partition's size)
. . hda5 (hd1,4) = logical partition - 15GB
. . hda6 (hd1,5) = logical partition - 40GB
. . hda7 (hd1,6) = logical partition - 40GB
. . hda8 (hd1,7) = logical partition - 40GB
. . hda9 (hd1,8) = logical partition - 40GB
. . hda10 (hd1,9) = logical partition - ~20GB

You will not "see" sda2 or hda4 in your drive output in GRUB or if you run something like df (disk free) from the command-line. We can go into the reasons some other time.

Additional Note: Motherboards that do not natively recognize SATA (for example, the nForce2 mobos), load the SATA drivers after the POST, which means that the SATA drives may not be seen the same way by the differing processes (GRUB, Windows, fdisk, Gparted, the MBR, etc.). Through trial and error, you should be able to eventually discern how things are "done". Taking notes during any disk work is important.

6. Install Windows first and put it on the first recognizable drive and partition (hd0,0 or sda1 in our example above). I typically set aside 12GB for the Windows installation (only!) and then use other partitions for application installation, backup/archive, downloads, et al. The MBR (Master Boot Record) will get written on the first sectors of the physical drive. I *DO NOT* recommend installing GRUB to the MBR. I never like to have the MBR getting overwritten by subsequent linux installations.

This is the reason why I suggest having a partition set aside for your /boot directory, which is where we are going to install GRUB to.

On most modern distros (if using the installation "wizard"), you will have to do a custom install of GRUB, and choose to install to the partition where /boot will be mounted (hd1,0 or hda1 in the example above). You will not be able to easily see the contents of the MBR, but you can easily read the /boot drive from any OS that can mount and read the filesystem (ext3 most likely).

7. The file that controls the GRUB menu (the menu that you are presented with shortly after the POST screen, where you select which OS you wish to boot to) is "/boot/grub/menu.lst". Some distros link the /boot/grub/grub.conf file to the menu.lst file, but all you have to do is alter the menu.lst file and you can be sure that the changes will take affect. Initially, you may spend some time with the menu.lst file tweaking things like the splash screen, drive numbering, titles, etc. You must edit the menu.lst file with a 'proper' editor, one that recognizes characters/spaces/tabs properly. I recommend gedit for beginners.

*Beneficial Tip*: After installation, when presented with the GRUB menu, you can change how the system boots. Highlight the OS you want to work on, select 'e' (for 'edit') and then make any appropriate changes (like rearranging drive order). When you are finished, select 'ESC' to exit the editing process and then select 'b' (for 'boot') to boot from the new configuration. If the changes you made "work", be sure to make the changes permanent by altering your /boot/grub/menu.lst file.

8. Most modern distros will recognize that you have Windows installed (remember, you loaded Windows first, right?), as long as they can recognize the drive. The typical entry during the Linux install process will read;



I normally change this to be;



What appears after "title" is meaningless, it is simply text that you will see at the GRUB menu during bootup.

9. If you are installing more than one Linux distribution, you can make life very easy on yourself by doing the following...

a. Have the partitions set aside beforehand, just like above
b. Install GRUB to the /boot directory (which will be the / directory/partition if you didn't set aside a partition for the /boot dir on the new install)
c. After installation, boot to your first linux install, create a directory for the new linux install, mount the drive that contains the /boot directory to it and then copy the entry for the new linux install in its /boot/grub/menu.lst to your first linux install's /boot/grub/menu.lst.

So, if I had the following;



it might look something like this afterwards;



By always writing GRUB to the new install's /boot partition, you can retain the integrity of your 'good' GRUB install without ever losing your previous settings that you worked so hard to get right. As long as you stay updated on your GRUB version, you'll always be good to go. You can even install a new distro over your first linux install and then (don't utilize the 'old' /boot partition yet) once installed, just do like you did above and copy the new install's menu.lst entry over to your 'old' menu.lst, then you can alter your /etc/fstab file to mount the 'old' /boot partition to /boot instead.


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I can write/edit more later...

/skilless

With re-mapping (tricking Windows on the drive order) in the /boot/grub/menu.lst, and making the numbering correct when the drives are all connected, you can fix this issue. It may take a little while to get it right, but its definitely do-able.

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Side Note: I have probably ran into just about every conceivable booting issue there is outside of anything to do with Vista. I have been multi-booting Windows and some Linux (and/or BeOS) combination since at least 1999. I have written official HowTos for Mandriva (back when it was Mandrake) on all sorts of things, ranging from getting USB memory sticks working (back when it was a mystery, not like now), loading nVidia drivers (again, when it was a mystery), etc.

I currently own a system with 3 HDs (120GB EIDE, 200GB SATA1, & 320GB SATA2), an nForce2 mobo (doesn't natively recognize the SATA drives), nVidia 7800GS AGP video, and have 4 OSs (and one pOS) on the system;

Ubuntu 6.10 (Primary)
Sabayon 3.3
OpenSuSe 10.2
Ubuntu 7.04
Windows XP Pro SP2

In case anyone feels "stupid" for having done something that lost them data or messed up their configuration, I can commiserate. I have screwed up more times than I can recall, but each time I researched and tweaked and asked around until I could fix/recover (or at least boot again) from the problem. Making mistakes is sometimes costly, but it is the very best learning tool.

Urgh, forgot to say what "re-mapping" means, sorry.

As I wrote above, Windows XP wants to be on the first recognizable physical drive and install on the first partition of that drive. So, sometimes us humans set things up differently than proprietary software (like Windows) would do it, so being the superior entity, we just trick it into thinking what we want it to believe and get back to work...

In GRUB, you can pass information to the boot table to trick the system into telling Windows to pay no attention to that man behind the green curtain, that is not the first partition, this one over here is.



So, what you need to look at above is those two "map" commands. The first tells the system that the 2nd drive is now considered the 1st drive. The second statement says that the 1st drive is now the 2nd drive. With only two drives, this may seem intuitive, but like I said, that's because the human brain is the superior "device". For hardware/software, you have to be specific and let it know that #1 is now #2 and that #2 is now #1.

If you had three drives, you could have hd0 = hd2, hd1=hd0, and hd2=hd1 for example (there are only six (3!) possible combinations there).

Hopefully that helps k1u, you could probably use what is inside the code area in your /boot/grub/menu.lst file and it might work based on what you wrote above.

why are you using ubuntu 6.10 and not 7.10? i have a dual boot vista/ubuntu 7.10 and it couldnt be easier to setup on a single drive.

1.install windows be it xp or vista
2.install ubuntu to whichever drive you were planning
3.once installation is done boot up in linux
At this point your dual boot is complete. If you primarily use windows like i do i suggest making it the default os to load you can do that by.

1. open up a terminal and enter
sudo gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst
-you will have to enter your password
2. the default value for booting is 0 which will load linux first
the numbering starts at 0 so if you want your windows partition to load first change it to 4.
3. save the file and your done! you can also change the name of vista so it just says windows vista or whatever you might want to call it.


hope this helps, i havent been using linux that much but this is the way i do it. here is a link where i got this info from.

http://apcmag.com/5046/how_to_dual_boot ... lled_first

i have also messed up more times that i wish to remember so i would strongly suggest to use a backup product to backup your information before you try and install linux.
two very good products are acronis trueimage home, and symantec ghost. i have used them both and they work very good. if your not using a backup software already i would definitely buy one and an external hard drive to store the backups on.

i have lost too much information before using these and cant tell you how much they have saved me since i bought them.

hope this helps.

Look at the date of the first post. It's July 2007, thus 7.10 was not out at the time that this thread was made.

Update for version 8.04 of Ubuntu.
The final installation screen looks like this:

You have to click the advanced button to get the boot options.

Personally, I think I would have liked the yes/no option that apparently was available before, but since I'm new to this game I can't say for sure. I can say that the current installation method gave me a bit of grief.