dual-booting 2 hard drives?

[wurmy]

2 hdds in my system, one has windows, the other redhat linux. is it possible to dual-boot drives as you do when you have two OS's on one drive? and if
so should i have the hdds set up as normal, with my primary (windows) drive as master, and the linux drive as slave? and if so how do i get my system to give me the option of which drive/OS to boot to?
wurm

[Unruly]

what I think you're asking is if you go to one drive, will you still be able to dual boot. Simple answer is yes.

What you would do is make a drive with 2 big partitions. The first partition (important) should be windows, simply because windows requires that it be on the first partition on the master drive. Linux, however can be anywhere on any ammount of drives/partitions.

Basically when you go to reinstall linux again, you'd make partitions with the second part of the drive (second partition (/dev/hda2 or something of the like)), and tell the installer that you'd like lilo to be installed on the mbr of your drive, then, once in linux, you'd modify the lilo.conf to point to both linux and optionally to windows. http://www.linuxnewbie.org/ubb/smile.gif hope this helps some.

[mikeylikesitz]

This may or may not help, but i went and bought "system commander" for my boot manager, before i realized that lilo would do it. Anyways i kept "commander" and used it, and it works just fine. My 2 hdd are also set up with windows on the master and linux on the slave. I guess the biggest reason i've kept "commander" was the fact that i can mess with the slave drive (reinstalling or switching linux distro's) without a hassle to windows or the MBR, which i have done. (i started with Mandrake and am now using Suse and will soon add another drive with Slackware or Debian, i hope. http://www.linuxnewbie.org/ubb/biggrin.gif) I hope it helps

[optech]

here's what i have
hda1 -- 2 gigs -- windows
hdb1 -- 2 gigs -- fat32 - files/programs
hdb2 -- 2 gigs -- linux

i don't think it matters as long as windows is primary master...
i should probably move linux to the first 2 gig drive and windows to the second, but i'm lazy


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"...seldom give ungaurded advice, for advice is a dangerous gift, even from the wise to the wise, and all courses may run ill." J.R.R. Tolkien

[wurmy]

just in case anyone else ever has the same question: (cause i hate it when i search the forum and see someone fixed a problem i had, and didn't bother to post how):

i reran the linux setup with both hdds connected, windows as master, linux as slave. i ran the expert setup, and when it brought up the lilo boot and partition section, i told it to install the lilo on the mbr of the master hdd, and do the completely linux install on the second. it went smoothly and now when my system boots i get the LILO BOOT: prompt and i can either hit enter to boot to linux, or type "dos" to go to windows. thanks all that helped me and i hope this helps someone else.

wurmy