Arch Linux

Chaos

Member

Registered: 2006-07-18

Posts: 10

Dual boot with 2 hard drives.

Hi All,

Im fairly new to linux and thought id give arch a try.

Currently I have 2 sata hds,  1 has xp and other is blank.

Just wondering what is the best way to setup dual boot.

Should I install arch on 2nd hd and boot from that in the bios
or install grub in 1st hd mbr ?

And if anyone has a similar setup can you post the config info I would need to enter for grub.

Cheers

/goes of to read more about grub.

djpharoah

Member

From: SoCal

Registered: 2006-06-18

Posts: 185

Re: Dual boot with 2 hard drives.

I had a similar setup when I had my workstation. I would run windows on its own drive and arch on its own.

Also note in grub the first/master harddrive on your controller is hd0 and hd1 is the secondary/slave drive. In this case your windows drive should be hd0 and your arch drive should be hd1.

also note you have to have this section to boot your windows drive.

# For booting Windows 2000/XP
title Windows
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
makeactive
chainloader  +1

Notice the second line (hd0,0) states that windows is on the first harddrive and the first partition. Yes, even the first partition of every drive is labelled as 0 instead of 1.

Also in my experiance I have had better luck installing grub to the MBR of the drive that is set to boot first. In most cases this is the windows/main harddrive.

If you need more help post here.
GL

EDIT: check out this link for more information. Dont worry about it being a Gentoo wiki link since the information is universal.

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IBM T41p - 2373-xXx - kernel26thinkpad