sushistix

My PC has Windows XP installed. I have a new hard drive to install as the slave drive. I would like to partition this slave drive with a large ntfs partition and install Ubuntu on another partition. I have found threads about XP on the slave and Linux on the master. I have also seen threads/tutorials about XP on one drive and Linux on the other but nothing really fits what I want to do.

I understand the installation of the hard drive as the slave and will learn how to partition the new drive when I find out what partitions should be created. I will back up everything I need from the master before I begin.

I would appreciate if anyone can direct me to this information if it exists and/or express any concerns or complications with this type of configuration.

Thanks

sushistix

Thanks to anyone who took the time to read this thread. I actually just finished successfully completing this task. Tomorrow when I have time I will post the procedure I used and hopefully it will help someone in the future.

sushistix

First and most importantly I backed up anything that needed to be saved in case something went wrong.

I installed the new hard drive as the slave.
Formatted the new HD with a 90 gig NTFS partition and left the rest unformatted using windows disk management tool.
Restarted with boot from CD settings to boot with the Ubuntu 7.1 live CD.
Chose install.
Went through the install steps setting language, time, and keyboard settings.
When the step for partition preparation came I chose Manual.
Selected the unformatted partition on the slave drive.(hd1).
Created a "/swap" partition of 2 gig. It auto sets the format.
Created a "/boot" partition of 730 MB to install the grub loader to. Format of ext3.
Created a "/" partition with the rest of the free space. This also had a format of ext3.
Continued through install steps.
On the final step there is and Advanced option. Selected this and specify were grub is installed.
The auto setting is (hd0). Changed this to (hd1,3) the /boot partition of the slave drive. I did not want to change anything on my master drive and wanted to continue using the windows boot loader.
Finish install. Remove CD. Reboot.
On reboot windows loaded as there was no way to choose Ubuntu yet.
I installed a utility called bootpart. It is available from numerous places on the web.
Ran bootpart from the commandline. This gives a listing of all partitions and highlights the partition with grub.
Chose the partition highlighted gave a name for the .bin file it will create on the drive windows is installed on and a name to be added to the windows boot loader menu.
When run it created ubuntu.bin on the drive with windows and modified the boot.ini file to add an entry for Ubuntu. Now when booting I have the coice of XP or Ubuntu.

I am now able to boot either OS with no problem. Time will tell if letting the windows boot loader initially run things will work out. The only thing I can forsee happening is that a windows update may write over the boot.ini. If this happens I can just rerun the bootpart utility. The other thing worth mentioning is that I did not create a Fat32 partition for sharing files. I plan to use the NTFS-3G driver to give Ubuntu the ability to read and write to the files on the NTFS partition I created.

I would advise that anyone trying this, or any other install method that is unfamiliar to them, back up important data read and learn all you can, and write up a plan before you start. This is what I did and it made the installation smoother and less duanting.

If anyone has questions or other input I may have left out please post it.

ethical

Hi!
Thank you, for the these notes on dual booting. As I am the new user to Red Hat Linux I was also trying to do dual boting with xp like the same situation like you on the other Hdd, many concepts now have been cleared with your notes, only one left , in which you sd about (hd1,3) why in 3 sector when you can use grub as the boot loader and it can be stored on (hd0,1) or (hd1,0).

Please solve this problem

thanks

bye

budman7

Either way works.
I prefer putting grub on the MBR and booting anything else via chainloader, when installing multiple operating systems.
but some people prefer to keep the windows bootloader intact and on the MBR.
It is just a matter of choice.

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