I'm asking this now because I expect a problem and will not be able to ask when my machine is down.

My machine has 3 discs on an icp scsi raid controller and 2 sata 10k drives. I will partition the drives with the scsi raid as home and one of the sata drives will have the linux swap partition and the other the 2008.1 installation. The drive with the linux swap on it also has an xp partition and I want to dual boot. Suse couldn't get it's head round this arrangement and I eventually found that this was down to the xp partition being on disc 1 rather than 0 as would be the normal case. Seems that machine still booted from 0 but ran xp from 1. Currently I'm unhappily running suse 10.3 and got it to work by installing an old copy of bootmagic and switching the drive connections around. Bootmagic takes me into suse but won't start up xp so seems to have the same problem as the suse installer. When I get to suse this way I'm offer a boot to windoze but it doesn't work reporting that ntldr is missing. (It is there)

I assume that just as suse offers a number of options on boot installation 2008.1 does the same but as I don't fully understand them I will not know which option to choose. I intend to swap the sata disc connections over to how they were originally. The machine will then boot xp and then I will install 2008.1. Will I have the same problem I had with suse? What boot options do I need to select to overcome them? I can use nt's bootfix for recovery if needed (again).

I do have another option on dual booting but I should ask that elsewhere - relative merits of virtualbox and vmserver. Virtualbox is very impressive but still takes some time to "boot up". Is vmserver any better in this respect? It would be nice to just have a couple of windoze program icons on my desktop. Unfortunately wine is unlikely to be able to run the few windoze programs I need. I also thought that vmserver was pay for ware.

John

I also have an odd boot setup. Let me walk you through what I have found, it may be of some use to you.

I have a total of 1TB of drive space across 3 SATA hard drives. None of them are in a raid configuration, but this still might be useful.

My main drive (hd0 in grub) has my windows partition on it. I have also found that it has a separate boot partition, and I knew about the recovery partition that was there.

The way that main drive is set up is (and I will use grub bootloader terms here)

hd0,0 - boot partition (or something like that)
hd0,1 - Recovery partition (seen in Windows as D: )
hd0,2 - Main Windows partition (C: )

When I installed Mandriva, I told it to configure grub as my bootloader and install it to the MBR, as usual. From there, on the summary screen I went in to modify grub. The Mandriva grub install detected 2 windows boot drives, hd0,1 and hd0,2

I figured out through trial and error that the one I wanted was hd0,2 so I just deleted the other one out of my /boot/grub/menu.lst

The Mandriva grub install should detect everything alright. It might take a bit of trial and error to determine which partition is the correct one to boot to (if there's only one partition on that XP drive, my guess is hd1,0) The entry for grub should look something like this:

title Windoze
rootnoverify (hd1,0)
chainloader +1

Mmmm. Sounds like I will have a problem.

John