Dual booting with two hard drives

[blackbelt_jones]

I've put off learning this long enough.

I want to dual boot two hard drives, as opposed to two hard drives on the same partition. Because I am always reinstalling and reformatting, it just seems simpler and safer to put Debian Sarge and WIndows XP Pro on two seperate hard drives.

I've had a hard time finding documentation geared toward this particular variation on dual booting, and any links or advice would be appreciated.

[eskaypey]

Google gives heaps of info.
This is what i found. Look somewhere in the middle of the page.
http://www.aboutdebian.com/dualboot.htm

[ph34r]

Make a small (100mb) partition at /dev/hda1 for /boot. Then install XP on the rest of /dev/hda (as /dev/hda2). Then install linux on /dev/hdb1, mounting /dev/hda1 as /boot. Use either bootloader (grub or ntldr and strip off a lilo boot sector to point to your linux install)

[GmarAppledude]

My very first install of Linux ever was like this (I knew no different), I had XP up and running on 1 disk (hda) then added another disk (hdb) and ran (booted off) the Linux installer cd. When asked for partitions I said 1Gb for swap and the rest for / on hdb. When asked for grub location I said hda MBR (the MBR of the XP disk). The boot folder is in the / partition hdb2. No separate boot partition. I works for me anyway. I have a similar setup now on Rig1 using a pair of SATA raptors. It could not be simpler. Just go for it.

[StarTiger]

Make a small (100mb) partition at /dev/hda1 for /boot.

You don't even have to do that, you can put /boot on /dev/hdb1. I've used that wth out any trouble. that way you can keep the two completely isolated to their own drives.

From there, the easiest way is is to install winXP (then win98, if you still use that, i'd do) THEN (note, install linux last since it sets up your boot loader) install your favorite flavor of linux. Then when you get to the boot loader part of the install, make sure that you have entries for winxp and linux and any other OS's you run.

Have fun.

[nuttron]

Is there not a tutorial about dual booting winXP and Slack on this forum (by JohnT)..?

I boot slack with a floppy (put lilo on the floppy)and i did install lilo on the superblock of hdb for when i would have the guts to mess with windows bootloader...(the wife needs windows for her university work).... :D

[timothykaine]

I've put off learning this long enough.

I want to dual boot two hard drives, as opposed to two hard drives on the same partition. Because I am always reinstalling and reformatting, it just seems simpler and safer to put Debian Sarge and WIndows XP Pro on two seperate hard drives.


Not a solution, but I prefer to have a small hard drive with the two OS's, and then one large storage drive. Im not as much worried about losing my OS as my storage when screwing around. I feel safer knowing no matter what Im changing, nothing is touching my backups and project files that I read/write from both operating systems.

[banzaikai]

This is just the thing my RH7.2 is set up to do. It took a couple of tries to get it "just right", but I wound up with (on two 20GB drives):

hda1 (C) -> Win98SE, 10GB
hda5 (D) -> FAT32 Data, 10GB
hdb1 -> /boot, 512MB
hdb2 -> /swap, 512MB
hdb3 -> / , 19GB

Now, what got me confused was when I was partioning the second HD, it wasn't clear how to "mount" the Windows drive without destroying data. After I figured that out, it went as expected.

You may also be wondering why I have the second 10GB partition (hda5). This is to allow the sharing of data between the two OSes. Since both can R/W to FAT32, I can keep my music/movies/pics on that partition without having to have duplicates of everything (saves room!). This is similar to what timothykaine is doing. Since I do all of my CD burning from the Linux side, I let that have the full 19GB to hold the images. Now, you mention WinXPpro, which wants to use NTFS as default. Linux hasn't been too good at writing to NTFS, so I'd stay with FAT32. Note that FAT32 has a maximum file size of 2GB. No DVD images can be stored on FAT32 - make some room on the Linux or NTFS sides.

The added benefit of all this is that Windows cannot see the Linux drive, and if someone is booted into Windows, they're none the wiser. This means your data is fairly safe. Handy when cousins come to visit and want to use the computer.

banzai "dual booted" kai

[blackbelt_jones]

Not a solution, but I prefer to have a small hard drive with the two OS's, and then one large storage drive. Im not as much worried about losing my OS as my storage when screwing around. I feel safer knowing no matter what Im changing, nothing is touching my backups and project files that I read/write from both operating systems.

Wow, this is fascinating! Does this mean that BOTH my windows and Linux Systems have access to the larger storage drive? And what kind of filesystem should I use for the storage drive?

Thanks everyone for the advice. Right now everything is being held up while I replace my apparently long-faulty motherboard. I'm back to running my old 266 mhz PC of crap.

[IsaacKuo]

Wow, this is fascinating! Does this mean that BOTH my windows and Linux Systems have access to the larger storage drive? And what kind of filesystem should I use for the storage drive?

I started off doing that, with a FAT32 storage drive. It was an unhappy solution, since I lost proper file permissions on my storage drive (everything listing as ugly 777 green), and FAT32 has annoying size limitations.

Since then, I've come up with a far happier solution--my "storage drive" is in a separate computer--my file server. It's a big ext3 linux partition accessed via NFS, so there are no annoyances with file permissions. This server is also set up as a SAMBA file server, so my Windows laptop can access the files.

The sheer convenience of a central file server far outweighs the modest performance penalty of NFS compared to local file access.