Dual booting Win2k and Linux Mandrake using 2 physical hard drives.

[ski999]

How to do this without writing information to the master boot record of each drive? I left my Win2k drive plugged in last week and a Redhat install wrote to my other physical drive. After deleting Linux I had to reinstall Win2k to get it to boot...just got a bunch of characters flying past my screen at boot! Thought I'd be safe by using seperate physical drives :(
Heres my current setup...
Drive 1: 6 gig primary partition {fat32) with Win2k
(aint touching this!)
Drive 2: 4 gig drive of with the last gig on drive is partitioned (fat16) for win2k's swap file. (yes win2k also likes having the swap seperate from the os
:D )
The first 3 gigs of unpartitioned space are for Linux to install itself on...use it as it wishes :)

What im trying to accomplish is for each operationg systems booting procedure to be totally independant of the other. If I decide to unplug my linux drive or something else, I want to still be able to boot main drive. I figure the easiest way is with some kind of boot manager that runs from a floppy instead of writing to the master boot record of my main drive or using Win2k simple boot.ini file. Everything I've read so far deals with dual booting os's on 1 physical drive. Any help would be appreciated :)

[freaker]

you can go out and get system commander or something like that, that lets you add more than one. Or you could just make a boot floppy for Linux -

freaker :cool:

[CMonster]

Thanks to linux_guru for the following: (http://www.sysopt.com/forum/Forum9/HTML/003412.html) "OK. Here's how you do it. No 3rd party boot managers required.

1. Install W2K first. Leave enough room for Linux. (2 Gb +) This can be on the same disk, or a separate disk.

2. Install Linux, using "expert" mode. This gives you greater control over your installation.

3. When you install your Linux boot loader, choose LILO, not grub. DO NOT select MBR. Choose first sector of your root ( / ) partition. This will be /dev/hda2 if on the same disk, or /dev/hdb1 if on your second disk, etc.

4. Make the boot floppy, during the Linux installation.

5. When the Linux install is complete, reboot using the floppy created during installation.

6. With Linux up, insert a fresh DOS formatted floppy and mount it with "mount -t msdos /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy".

7. Enter "dd if=/dev/hdb1 of=/mnt/floppy/bootsect.lin bs=512 count=1". This may vary, depending where your / partition is. Unmount the floppy & reboot.

8. W2K will come normally. Copy a:\bootsect.lin to c:\bootsect.lin

9. Edit c:\boot.ini to include: C:\bootsect.lin="Linux"

10. Done ! You should now have the option of booting W2K or Linux, using the W2K bootloader.

I have tested this with W2K Pro and Mandrake 7.2 and it works great.

Good luck."

[ 15 March 2001: Message edited by: CMonster ]