Convenience- 2 Hard Drives vs. Dual Boot?

[Penguin123]

I have done a Windoze/RH6.2 dual boot a few months back only to mess up my computer eventually due to being overly curious and had to reinstall Windows and delete Linux. Just 2 days ago, I decided jump back on the Linux train and give Red Hat 7.1 a go.

I am pondering this question. Should I just buy another hard drive? I remember when I booted up in with the dual-boot method, how it was so convenient to choose between the two OSes. I want that same or similiar convenience but want the safety and security of just having each OS on their very own hard drive so I can safely experiment and make mistakes with learning Linux without messing up Windows. Just to clarify, I am talking about buying two hard drives and putting one OS on each.

Let's say that the Windows Hard Drive is the Master and the Linux hard drive is the slave. Every time upon booting must I continually go into the BIOS to choose the Linux SLAVE, as my MASTER so that it boots up the Linux hard drive? How can one make it convenient like dual-booting, to choose between OSes?

[Penguin123]

Oh, and I have done the appropriate thing before asking-look. I searched the forums and Google and no comparison between dual-boot and 2 hard drive setup could I find. *shrug* Hence, me asking here. Thanks in advance for your help :)

[Helical Cynic]

You can use LILO or GRUB (almost certainly one or the other will be installed with your distro) to dual-boot from 2 partitions or 2 drives. You don't necessarily need 2 drives t o check out Linux without hosing Windows. Keep the following stuff on hand and you should be fine:

Working Windows98 boot floppy
Working Linux boot floppy

These will let you restore stuff and get back into your system when you have a little too much fun with settings. As far as keeping the two separate goes, install one or the other (most ppl say Windows first), but partition your disk (search for this in the forums for more info) so that you've got whatever space you want/need for each OS. Then install Linux, and set up LILO so that the Windows partition is an option on startup. (man lilo.conf for more info) No need to use BIOS settings at all. One note: you'll need to install LILO to the MBR if you want to use it as your bootloader, or to the root Linux partition if you're using BootMagic/System Commander/NT Bootloader/something else.

Hope this helps!


One other thing:
To really prevent Linux from messing up Windows stuff (like writing stuff to the Windows partition...) do this in fstab:

/dev/*your windows partition* /mnt/*where you mount it* vfat defaults,ro 0 0

the ro after defaults tells mount to only mount the partition read-only. That way you can still read your files from the win part, but you won't mess them up.

[ 13 August 2001: Message edited by: BTBGuy ]

[Linuxcool]

If you decide to use two hard drives, just install lilo on the mbr of the windows drive and add some lines to the lilo.conf file to be able to boot windows from lilo.

[jrbush82]

I have Linux Madrake 8 on a primary 4 gig drive with GRUB installed in the master boot record, and then for slave, I have a 20 gig busted into 2 fat32 partitions for windows and storage. GRUB/Mandrake detected the partitons during installation and knows them to be there and will boot to windows on the slave, or linux as the master. It works very well, haven't had a problem with it at all. And if I want to get rid of the Linux drive, I just put the slave as master, and then I have an all Windows machine. Kind of nice, I wish to get rid of Windows all together, but it'll take me some time to do that. Thats just what I've done, and it works like a charm.

Good Luck,
jrbush82

[Strike]

Truth be told, I think that the separate hard drive configuration is far simpler in general. As long as you can get it bootable once it's installed, it simplifies a lot of things. No need to worry about making space for partitions or anything like that.

[posterboy]

Here's yet another way, that I find really convenient. For 10 bucks or so, you can buy trays, that are front panel removeable. These are not hot-swaps, you have to shut down to change them. I have 2 of these mounted. Any numer of hard drives can be shoved in these things, and booted. I change linux drives every 30 days. A script pulls over what I have to transfer to a common drive. This offers excellent protection against hacks, hosing the system, etc, as the black-hats are NOT going to hack the drive thats in the desk drawer. I can clone a good drive over to a hosed one in abt 15 minutes. When the grandkids want to play Monster Truck Madness, I just plug in the winderz drive.
HTH, Ray

[Penguin123]

After some more proactive searching on Google during an Adobe GoLive! lab at school tonight I discovered this:
---------------------
What if a pc have 2 hard drives "C" & "D" ?
When a pc have 2 hard drives ( C, D), install Windows 2000 on "C" drive (NTFS format).
Install Red Hat Linux on "D" drive. While installing Red Hat linux don't load LILO (Linux Loader).
LILO will prompt us to select the operating system. Even if LILO installed, LILO don't detect
Windows 2000 if file system is NTFS. At the time of booting Linux will not be detected
and PC will boot to Windows 2000 (File structure type NTFS).
So what one has to do is DON'T install LILO. If LILO is not installed, Linux installation will prompt
for creating boot disk. Don't forget to create boot disk.
-----------------------
While I don't have Windows 2000, I DO have Windows 98SE. So this answer is very applicable.

So what I gather from this is that I must make a boot disk as to choose Linux, thereby booting into the SLAVE hard drive instead of the MASTER Windows 98SE hard drive, so that it chooses Linux instead. Okay, I understand. This option isn't bad. But I'm still searching/hoping for a better option rather than just having to stick a disk in everytime I want to load Linux, especially if I am going between them. I'd rather boot up, get a prompt of some sort "Windows or Linux?" pick one, and go! Is using the Linux boot disk the closest I can get to instantly choosing my operating system on boot up with 2 different OS occupied hard drives???
Thanks for your replies on this thread so far everyone. You've been so supportive and helpful in your suggestions :)