Has anyone done a dual boot like this?

**afireinside81** · 07-06-2004

I've got Redhat 9 and WinXP installed on my computer at the moment. I've got an Asus P4C800-E Deluxe board with an 80Gb IDE drive connected as primary master and two 80Gb sata drives connected in raid0 fashion. All 3 drives are connected to the ICH5R controller. WinXP is installed on the raid array and working fine. Redhat is installed on the IDE drive with grub written to the first sector of a /boot partition. That works fine too. The problem is with the actual dual booting. With my boot device set to be the raid array, I have tried to load grub from ntldr following some guides on the net. Basically I made a copy of the boot sector from my /boot partition and copied it over to Windows and edited by boot.ini. Most guides were basically giving the same instructions so I'm assuming this procedure is correct, but perhaps only for setups without RAID.

When I select Redhat at the boot menu, the word GRUB appears on the screen and it hangs. Does anyone know why that might happen? Is it because of the sata raid / IDE combination I've got? I've read many threads on different forums about dual boots but very few of them refer to a setup similar to mine. I can still boot into each OS but it requires either changing settings in BIOS or using a Redhat boot floppy. I'd like to know if there is a better solution to this problem before I resort to those. Any help is appreciated.

P.S.
Redhat cannot read my sata raid array at all but Windows can read the FAT32 partitions on my Redhat drive. I have also tried to install Mandrake 10 on the same setup. It could see my two sata drives and even showed /mnt/windows/
but after installation I found that it totally messed up my raid array. So I guess that means stay away from Mandrake for now.

**loft306** · 07-06-2004

More information is needed ...could post your grub.conf please or your menu.lst whichever one has the grub configuration in it please

And you have gotten closer that most on there first try...so feel good

**afireinside81** · 07-06-2004

Here's my grub.conf file:

Code:

# grub.conf generated by anaconda
#
# Note that you do not have to rerun grub after making changes to this file
# NOTICE&#58;  You have a /boot partition.  This means that
#          all kernel and initrd paths are relative to /boot/, eg.
#          root &#40;hd0,0&#41;
#          kernel /vmlinuz-version ro root=/dev/hda2
#          initrd /initrd-version.img
#boot=/dev/hda1
default=0
timeout=10
splashimage=&#40;hd0,0&#41;/grub/splash.xpm.gz
title Red Hat Linux &#40;2.4.20-8smp&#41;
	root &#40;hd0,0&#41;
	kernel /vmlinuz-2.4.20-8smp ro root=LABEL=/ hdc=ide-scsi hdd=ide-scsi
	initrd /initrd-2.4.20-8smp.img
title Red Hat Linux-up &#40;2.4.20-8&#41;
	root &#40;hd0,0&#41;
	kernel /vmlinuz-2.4.20-8 ro root=LABEL=/ hdc=ide-scsi hdd=ide-scsi
	initrd /initrd-2.4.20-8.img

I hope someone can give me some pointers on how to get this dual boot going with my hardware setup. Is there something I can change in my grub.conf so that I can start grub from the ntldr? All I seem to get is GRUB on the screen and nothing else. I hope theres a better way than having to set the boot device to either the raid volume or my ide drive in BIOS to boot into the OS I want.

Mod edit - added code tags

**Dolda2000** · 07-06-2004

Can't you do the opposite instead, that is, chainboot NTLDR from GRUB?

If you change your BIOS to start GRUB, then press "c" when GRUB shows its menu to get to GRUB's command line mode, and run the following commands, does that boot Windows?

Code:

chainloader &#40;hd1&#41;+1
boot

**afireinside81** · 07-07-2004

Thanks for the help, I'll try that out. Is there a reference somewhere that I can look up to find out more about grub commands and other information about the bootloader. I'd like to learn more about it because Linux is totally new to me.

**variant** · 07-07-2004

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&q=grub

**Kylixen** · 07-07-2004

Originally Posted by afireinside81

Thanks for the help, I'll try that out. Is there a reference somewhere that I can look up to find out more about grub commands and other information about the bootloader. I'd like to learn more about it because Linux is totally new to me.

"man grub"

**Dolda2000** · 07-07-2004

Try "info grub" instead. The grub manpage is just a quick reference for the GRUB-from-Linux shell, and doesn't describe the actual commands. The GRUB texinfo manual, however, contains all that info.

**gi99** · 11-18-2006

I'm experiencing pretty much the exact same problem. I have WinXP running on a RAID array of 2 SATA drives, and I have Fedora Core 6 running on a third SATA drive (no raid). The /boot partition of my FC6 install has GRUB running on it.

I've looked at all the forums and tutorials for loading GRUB from NTLDR (I've done the boot sector copy with dd, I've checked GRUB configs, boot.ini configs, etc), but I run into the same problem with GRUB freezing. I even repartioned my /boot with LBA (as some forum suggested). Perhaps it has something to do with RAID.

I can probably get it to work by using GRUB on the MBR instead of NTLDR but I want to fix this just out of curiosity.

**devils casper** · 11-18-2006

Originally Posted by gi99

I've looked at all the forums and tutorials for loading GRUB from NTLDR (I've done the boot sector copy with dd, I've checked GRUB configs, boot.ini configs, etc), but I run into the same problem with GRUB freezing. I even repartioned my /boot with LBA (as some forum suggested). Perhaps it has something to do with RAID.
I can probably get it to work by using GRUB on the MBR instead of NTLDR but I want to fix this just out of curiosity.

disable RAID in BIOS and create image file boot.lnx using 'dd'. set it in NTLDR. enable RAID again.

casper

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