[SOLVED] Triple Boot in 3 HDD ?? How am I going to get Boot up ??

[wpjcp@hotmail.com]

Hi Im going to buy a new 160GB SATA next week,Currently I have a 40GB IDE and a 80GB SATA HDD.
I want to get my Final System like this,

40GB IDE -> 40GB Fedora

80GB SATA -> (40GBWindows 7 beta) + (40GB Backup to be used in every OS)

160GB SATA -> (80GB Windows XP pro) + (80GB Other stuff to be used in every OS) as the *** PRIMARY OS ***

Please tell me with a bit of explanation on how I can Assign the OS installation and Boot Order things , as I hate to Install OS's again and again,

How should I set the Booting order of the Hard drives in the BIOS ??

What will happen to the Boot order/menu If I remove/re-install
1. Fedora Hard Drive
2. XP Hard Drive
3. Windows 7 Hard Drive

[devils casper]

Unplug both SATA HDs. Install Fedora in IDE. Keep it plugged as Primary Master/First Boot Device. Plug-in Windows 7 and XP HDs. Add entries of both Windows OSes in grub.conf file of Fedora. Thats it.

Post output of fdisk -l command ( execute it in Fedora's Terminal/Konsole ) after plugging in all HDs as I suggested above. I will post code that you have to add in grub.conf file.

[wpjcp@hotmail.com]

What will happen If I remove the Fedora Disk ? Or some other Disk from the System ??
Will there be an error in in the Boot order ?

[devils casper]

There won't be any error because all disks will be independent of each other. You are going to add entries of Windows OSes in Fedora's GRUB. You are not modifying anything in Windows OSes.

[wpjcp@hotmail.com]

Oh k, How will the Boot up screen Look like to choose the OSes ??

[devils casper]

After editing grub.conf, GRUB Menu will appear at startup having options for all three OSes. You can select and boot any OS.

[wpjcp@hotmail.com]

Dont get mad for asking this question, But what will happen and what kind of a Boot menu will it have if i remove the Fedora Drive,

[devils casper]

But what will happen and what kind of a Boot menu will it have if i remove the Fedora Drive,

If you remove Fedora disk, Boot Menu will not apear and any Windows Hard disk set as First Boot Device will boot up.

All the three disks are independent of each other. You remove any, nothing will happen to others.

You are welcome to ask anything about Linux ! I will be glad to help you !

[wpjcp@hotmail.com]

If you remove Fedora disk, Boot Menu will not apear and any Windows Hard disk set as First Boot Device will boot up.

So I dont get a chance to get a boot menu for XP n Win 7 ? Its really annoying to change the boot order through BIOS u know, Doesn't Windows 7 make a boot menu ?
tanx

[yancek]

If you have Fedora on one hard drive, xp on another hard drive and windows 7 on a third hard drive with Fedora drive set to boot first, you will have a menu come up on the screen which is part of the Grub (Fedora) bootloader. This will give you the opportunity to boot into any of the three OS's.

If you install xp as the only OS on the second drive and remove the Fedora drive, the xp drive should boot if you have it listed as second in BIOS boot priority and it was installed properly.

If you remove the Fedora and xp drives and have windows 7 as the only OS on the third drive it should boot up if it was installed properly. I'm not familiar with windows 7 but understand that is a beta release of windows (aren't they all?) and probably will be similar to vista, might have the same bootloader. For information on windows 7 bootloader, you might try googling or going to a microsoft site for info?