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Dual boot on two drives [solved]


AlRoss
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Hi

 

I only just got started with Mandriva so am a total novice in this world!

 

I bought a second hard drive hdd2 for my PC and installed Mandriva Spring 2008 on that hard drive. It's partitioned with:

 

100Gb - NTFS partition for Windows

53Gb - Mandriva system space

155Gb - Mandriva documents space

and a swap partition that doesn't show in Konqueror but from memory of the install was sized around 7Gb

 

There is no sight of the original 60Gb hdd1 (Windoze C, D) in Konqeror - I guess its just ignoring it but why?

 

ANYWAY ... the game plan was to have the PC dual-boot offering either Windoze XP Home or Mandriva.

 

Right now all I can boot is into Mandriva.

 

I don't know how to configure this for dual boot and (foolishly) imagined that it might have been offered on install.

 

Can any wiser bird help please?

 

Thanks

 

Al

Edited by AlRoss
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7 GB for swap is way too much. Try 1 or 2 GB.

 

To see your other partitions, open Storage media on the desktop, can you see them there?

 

If you don't see them then you need to assign mount point to them first in the Mandriva control centre>local disks>manage disk partitions. mount points could be something like /media/hd .

 

You can add windows to GRUB in the Mandriva control centre>boot>set up boot system>next>add>other os (windows). In the Root box choose the first partitions on the HD where windows is installed.

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Thanks for your help. I'm (very) slowly getting to find my way about. Actually swap is about 3.8Gb - probably still too big but I'll leave it just now.

 

I looked at Mandriva control centre>local disks>manage disk partitions and found tabs for hda and hdb.

 

The hdb tab reports the partitions previously mentioned and in sequence these are reported in detail as:

/mnt/win_c2 - hdb1 - 99Gb - NTFS-3G

/ - hdb5 - 49Gb - journalised FS:ext 3

swap - hdb6 - 3.8Gb - Linux swap

/home - hdb7 - 144Gb - journalised FS:ext 3

 

So far so good!

 

The hda tab reports no partitions and the only action offered is "CREATE". No partitions are visible on hda. But perhaps this because there is no mount point??? This disk is the original Windows XP hard drive and verbs like "CREATE" make me a wee bit nervous. If "create" is going to create a mount point then perhaps I can feel confident but on the other hand it looketh like a "create partition" dialogue since the "CREATE" button only becomes available when the apparently unpartitioned disk space of hda is clicked. So, I'm feeling a little bit chicken right now.

 

Clicking in that apparently empty space in hda and then on the "Windows" Filesystem type produces a Create Partition dialogue that offers controls for size, filesystem type, and mount point. That's all very well but I don't want to create a partition in case its going to get formatted and ... well ... game over. And besides there were two partitions on that disk and I do not have their precise sizes in my head or anywhere else. In actual fact the second partition could be abandoned in extremis. There is little on there that I cannot recover. But, feeling less than confident about this process and would much prefer to be able to see the partitions that are already there and work with them rather than use any guesswork on their sizes.

 

Crossing-my-fingers-and-hoping in disk partitioning is not my kind of life!!! For example, if I were to go ahead and create a 55Gb partition with NTFS-3G I suspect the file allocation table will need to expand from its previous approx 30Gb and that might do irreparable damage to the Windows C drive partition.

 

Should I not be able to see those two partitions on hda in Mandriva control centre>local disks>manage disk partitions???

 

Is there another way to inspect the disk partitioning and recover the detail needed.

 

Thanks

 

Al (starting to regret getting into this :huh: But staying optimistic :) )

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I wouldn't suggest clicking Create, it sounds more like it will create a partition. However, open a console window and type:

 

su (enter root password when prompted)
fdisk -l /dev/hda

 

that's a lowercase L. Then see if you have a Windows partition listed on this disk as /dev/hda1. If nothing is shown, then the disk is empty for some reason and without a partition. If /dev/hda1 is shown, then it should give a type 7 of HPFS/NTFS.

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Thanks for your help. I'm feeling decidedly out of my depth and very grateful for all the kind help that's coming forward. Did just as you suggested and got the following results:

 

Disk dev/hda 60.0Gb 60022480896 bytes

16 heads, 63 sectors/track, 116301 cylinders

Units = cylinders of 1008 * 512 = 516096 bytes

Disk identifier = 0x4190f8e3

 

/dev/hda1 boot=* start=1 end=1 blocks=0 id=0 system=empty / partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary

/dev/hda2 boot=* start=1 end=1 blocks=0 id=0 system=empty / partition 2 does not end on cylinder boundary

/dev/hda3 boot=* start=1 end=1 blocks=0 id=0 system=empty / partition 3 does not end on cylinder boundary

/dev/hda4 boot=* start=1 end=1 blocks=0 id=0 system=empty / partition 4 does not end on cylinder boundary

 

I think that means its goosed! There were two partitions and now there appear to be zero. Somehow the Mandriva install has managed to kill these two partitions off. Most worrying. Fortunately I have backups of all my data files though not a full system backup. So I really need to get these partitions back - or at least partition 1.

 

Any thoughts???

 

Thanks again,

 

Al

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Thanks Ken. Unfortunately it's an OEM install of XP so no install disk - just a recovery version.

 

HOWEVER ... progress has been made :D I've looked around for partition repair tools and downloaded TESTDISK from http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

 

This runs in a Kernel window and using some hints from earlier I first entered SU <password>

 

TESTDISK scanned the offending drive and located two partitions and was able to fully restore the critical partition. The second partition is damaged and may be lost although testdisk can still see into its file structure and offers to copy files elsewhere. So I may get some files from there too.

 

Having used TESTDISK to recover the Windoze boot partition I was able to assign it as a boot option and Windoze booted right up - and promptly (or rather very dozily :wall: ) reminded me why I'm so keen to migrate to Linux!!!

 

I'm still looking into what I can recover from the Windoze D partition but am going to bed a much happier bunny than I expected to be.

 

Thanks again for help.

 

Al

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Welcome and congratulations ALRoss for keeping up an optimistic outlook.

 

Just to reassure you a little.....It is highly unlikely though not totally impossible that in installing Mandriva that it damaged you Windows setup.

 

We have all had those kind of doubts when we first started trying Linux for the first time after long use of Windows. You will have a very supportive crowd here at MUB to help make your transition Smoother.

 

As you gain experience and confidence you will wonder why you didn't make the transition earlier but you will certainly be glad you did.

 

Cheers. John.

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Thanks John,

 

You're a gentleman! And I have to say that the optimism grows with each passing hour.

 

I also got back all the files I really needed from the damaged partition. That TESTDISK tool is very nifty. If it can see the directory structures and read the files it will copy them off for you albeit one at a time. There were about 200 of them but it's just a matter of using the down arrow down the directory then pressing c <repeat until finger wears out>. They all arrived in my home folder complete with original directory structure. So I've been able to ditch the dud partition, create it anew, and re-assign it to a different role. So far so good.

 

I have to say that it does underline the value of having good backups. My brother only uses Linux and he keeps extensive full backups on an external USB HDD of around 1Tb. I'm going to look into doing the same, and backing up those Windoze partitions too. I've been lucky this time but luck is not the same as good management.

 

I still need my Windoze apps for a while until I can migrate all the things I do. There are also some Windoze apps that I genuinely prefer such as the Serif suite of DTP, drawing, and web-editors. I guess I'm just used to the Serif application interfaces and their ease of use. For the most part the MS products have long since got relegated. I have used Thunderbird, Firefox, and OpenOffice for a long time now.

 

I'll try to migrate those under WINE though I note that it's also possible to run VM-Ware with Linux and have a Windoze machine running in there too. I did a spell as interim IT manager for a local engineering firm during which time we migrated all the servers from Windows 2003 to VM-Ware. We moved from 8 boxes to 2 big boxes and got far better performance and manageability. I hope they went on to migrate to Linux too. The performance difference is stunning.

 

Unfortunately I still need IE to access a particular web-site where I get work related e-mail. The site only works with IE - very tedious and IMHO a sign of poor design but there we are. But I also read one can get IE :lol2: for Linux so maybe I can finally shed Bill's apron strings and fly like I always wanted to.

 

Thanks again for your encouragement - hugely appreciated.

 

All the best

 

Al

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You can google ies4linux to get a nice installer to get Internet Explorer under Linux. Alternatively, install the user agent plugin to Firefox and you can pretend to be IE for that particular site :)

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Dual boot on two drives. I this make into this way that complete software installs on disc first (second separated disc), bootloader installs. I change disc and I disconnect previous and I make the same . I connect two discs now. From which it will take off this behind it depends from BIOS, this all ....Lex

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AlRoss, don't loose heart. I'm just the opposite of a computer geek! I like "messing around" with my computer, checking, changing, adding, deleting, etc. I've messed things up so badly, so many times, I've lost count! My kids are now in college, and when we bought them a laptop, they wouldn't even let me touch them!!! They're right too!!!! Anyway, no matter how badly I messed up things, here with this board, everyone has always been very, very, very patient and helpful. I started using linux (Mandrake) years ago because I didn't like Windows98, and I've always received all the help I've needed here with this board.

 

I dual boot, with 2 hard drives. I have one drive for only Mandriva. On the other, I have WindowsXP and my "backup" partition for linux. Just keep trying what the "guys" here tell you, and it will be OK. Our (you and I) biggest problem is that we are not that good with linux. I'm not that good because I just don't have the "head" for it. You, because you are just learning. But don't loose heart, you'll get it!

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  • 4 weeks later...

Hello,

 

I am having the same problem - just installed 2008.1. I was running Windows XP on a 10gb drive, which I turned into a slave drive with Linux as master. I can see the slave, with windows bits, with the media viewer under 2008.1. The boot loader also indicated an XP option, but when I tried to boot windows, I was told that the drive wasn't available (don't remember the precise language). If anyone has a suggestion as to how to make the Windows drive operable, I would appreciate it. I am also not a Linux guru (so limited/no console activity would be appropriate for me)

 

Regards -- Roger

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This may sound a bit scary, but I will take a look at my linux manual and see if I can figure out how to do this. I did note that the error message was "error 21: disk does not exist". Will get back with the bootloader script when I figure out how to do it....

 

Thanks - Roger

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