2 Hard drives, 1 Tower: can both be booted?

[Pepse]

Near as I can tell this is the right spot to ask this. What it is is that I have 1 tower and 2 hard drives. I don't have the room to set up 2 computers, so is there a way to be able to boot to each hard drive without having to do what I've been doing for the last 5 years, which is shutting down the computer and unhooking the Linux hard drive and hooking up the windows hard drive. And then vice versa.

 

Pepse.

[sjaglin]

Hi

Sorry I m nor sure what you mean, do you mean dual boot or both hard drive running a different operating system simultaneously?

 

Stef

[scarecrow]

It's quite easy, you don't have disconnecting anything or changing the BIOS boot sequence. Your normal bootloader can do that (using grub here), but you can also use free third party software, like that one.

[theYinYeti]

Let's look at this from different points of view.

 

1/ You don't want to switch disks on the hardware side.

 

You should be able to plug both disks in your computer. For that, you only have to have enough spare power and IDE cables. Besides, you'll have to configure the master/slave/single setting properly for each hard drive.

 

However, things are not exactly that simple: Windows was installed in a way that its own hard drive is expected to be drive C: and that cannot be changed, so this drive will have to be exactly where it used to be; the other hard disk (Linux) will then have on another IDE channel.

This means that the Linux installation won't find the partitions where it expects them.

So you'll have to boot a rescue or live CD, mount the Linux root (/) partition, and edit the mounted /etc/fstab file. Change the partitions accordingly, knowing that IDE0-master/slave, IDE1-master/slave are respectively hda/hdb, hdc/hdd.

 

2/ You want to be able to boot either system.

 

With the above setup, you're able to boot either system. Booting Linux is tricky, though, because the current boot-loader is that of Windows and doesn't know about Linux.

So you'll have to use Linux' boot-loader instead. This can be done after booting a LiveCD similarly to what you did for the fstab file, except this time you would have to edit eg: /etc/lilo.conf. This is not easy however because it involves manually editing the said file, and chrooting to the mounted partition to run eg: lilo.

Instead, I think it would be easier to boot the Linux hard drive using this:

http://btmgr.webframe.org/

and then using Mandriva's Control Center, you edit your boot options (add Windows as a boot option) and save the config to the Windows' drive MBR.

 

3/ You want to run both systems simultaneously.

 

That's an entirely different matter. There exists costly solutions to indeed run two OSes simultaneously, but I'm almost sure it is not on the x86 platform (it works by running a VMWare-like software as the OS, so that several guest OSes can run on it).

With your PC, you'll probably have to rely on a virtual machine for one of the two OSes (one will run inside the other). Check other threads for Xen, VMWare...

 

Yves.

[tyme]

short answer: no

 

running two OS's simultaneously and being able to switch between them with one keyboard, mouse and monitor isn't really possible. Xen and VMWare are virtualization tools, in a sense, and Xen doesn't allow you to switch between the OS's (that would be a security risk, and it has enough of those) - you have to ssh between or otherwise gain access, and even then you won't be to take full advantage of the systems.

 

There's a lot of technical problems with implementing such a solution. Two different systems accessing the same memory without something controlling which has access to what. Same with the cpu, or any hardware resource really.

[Reiver_Fluffi]

:huh:

 

I think the op is refering to a dual boot, as he says he is apparently disconnecting one drive in order to boot into the other. At least that's how I see it.

[Pepse]

I see that the way I posted has some confusion. But, the Yin Yeti is answering me correctly. Yes, 2 hard drives, 1 with Linux, and 1 with windows. So, I will work with his number 1 and 2 answers. That is what I am trying to do.

 

I have to head out to work now but if I feel I need more info I will post either tonite or tomorrow. I feel I have a grasp one what is said to do that, but if not I'll be back.

 

Pepse.

[tyme]

i misunderstood what you wanted...it was early, i wasn't awake yet :D

[AussieJohn]

Hi Tyme and others. I couldn't work out what he was trying to do either. Physically changing over hard drives to swap between OSs ?????.

Pepse, you need to do some quick reading up on dual booting. The only time you might need to something like that is if your box only had room for one HDD but even then it would be better to get a larger sized HDD and partition it appropiately.

But swapping HDDs ??????????. ??????????????????.

 

Cheers. John.

[Pepse]

AussieJohn, my preference has been to stay away from a dual boot hard drive. Ever since I started with Linux over 5 years ago I decided then that I did not want a dual boot hard drive. I did a fair amount of reading back then before I embarked on Linux , and still see it occasionally, wherein people seem to have hassles with dual boot systems. That is why I have stayed with 2 hard drives. Yeah it's a bit of a hassle but to me it is better than some of the hassles that come up with dual boot systems. In fact until recently my usage of windows was minimal. But since I have a hard drive with xp and my mobo and such are faster than my wife's, she tends to use mine more than hers. Hers is a an older win 98 se HP setup. And as I've said it would be nice to be able to just hook up both hard drives and choose an OS at boot. Also, hopefully it will be easy enough for my wife to understand. True my only needs for windows is for my Mercury Mystaque service and repair manual and a fair knowledge of xp for when her kids mess up there computers, and also, some people at work :D . So, I will be looking in to YinYetis link to "webframe".

 

Later. Pepse.

[theYinYeti]

See here:

http://btmgr.webframe.org/download.html

 

At all times, those people had problems with their web site... :lol:

 

Yves.

[Pepse]

OK, I am back with a few questions about this situation. First of all webframe site does not work. Second I downloaded the GAG47 zip file onto a floppy. So, I am ready to try this. I have learned that windows has to be my master and Linux has to be my slave drive. I was told that I have to change my LILO/GRUB so that it understands that Linux will be on a slave. Is there some kind of tutorial for doing this whole shebang? How to set up GAG47 and how to change the bootloader/? If not would someone have the time to tell me? If so you can send me an email or post here.

 

Later. Pepse.

[iphitus]

There's no hassle I know of with a dual boot system that could possibly be worse than swapping hard drives. You've caused yourself far more hassle by not allowing it to set it up for you at install time

 

It's simple.

-> Plug both the drives in, with the Mandriva drive first, so it boots mandriva.

-> In mandriva, go to the bootloader configuration, and just add windows to it.

 

Automagically, now you will have a menu on boot to either windows or linux.

[AussieJohn]

I have been dual booting for 4 years and guess what???.

I haven't had a problem in dual booting that I could not easily remedy in the past 3 1/2 years and have had NO problems at all in the past 2 1/2 years.

 

You have only been making a rod for your own back.

 

For ease of use and reliability you cannot go past GRUB as the bootloader. In fact in the forth coming 2007.1, Grub will be the default bootloader.

 

 

Cheers. John.

[SoulSe]

Moved this to 'Installing Mandriva' since what we seem to really be discussing is a setup with Windows on one hard drive and Mandriva on the other with dual-booting.

 

In my mind, this falls in the category of installation.