Dual booting on multiple drives

[E-POTS]

I just got a Dell XPS 17 and it came with 2 hard drives installed. Windows 7 (64bit) is installed on hard drive 1 and hard drive 2 is formated with NTFS and is completely empty.

My plan is to delete the partition, or shrink, on hard drive 2 giving Fedora 16 (64bit) somewhere around 60 - 150GB of storage space and give the rest back to windows.

Now I understand that GRUB wants to install itself on MBR "/dev/sda", but I want to continue using the windows boot loader and leave my first hard drive completely untouched. So I would prefer GRUB to go to "/dev/sdb", can this be done? Yes I understand this is make Fedora unbootable...for now.

If GRUB can be installed on drive2, I found the following command to copy the grub boot sectors

dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/tmp/linux.bin bs=512 count=1

how do I make that command work when its on drive 2?

And I need to edit the windows boot.ini file, do I just add:

c:\linux.bin="Fedora"

or is there more I need to do?

[jayd512]

These two posts should help out a bit...
How to Dual Boot Windows 7 and Linux using BCDEdit | iceflatline
Adding Ubuntu to the boot manager - Windows 7 Forums

[dencar]

I have a Dell XPS 17 and also want to use the windows bootloader. I use EasyBCD and have found that few linux distributions will allow GRUB to be installed on /dev/sdb; Sabayon and Linux Mint Debian Edition being the least troublesome. I currently use LMDE, but there have been no recent updates to it and Gnome 3 is not available without departing from the normal update routine. Fedora 16 works on my old Dell Inspiron, using GRUB on /dev/sda, but it will not start with GRUB on /dev/sdb using EasyBCD; all I get is a flashing cursor. I'll be interested to hear if you manage to run Fedora 16 the way you want.

[E-POTS]

ok, i'm having a bit of technical issues trying to just run the installer. The anaconda installer just doesn't run, after the test media option (tested or skipped) it just dies...

just some specs:
Dell XPS 17 L702X
Intel i7-2670QM 2.20GHz
8GB RAM Dual Channel
Intel HD Graphics Family, Nvidia Geforce GT 555M
Windows 7 Pro 64bit
BluRay reader, DVD/CD Burner
2x 500GB harddrive, SATA configured as ahci
Bios version A16


is there anything there that would prevent the anaconda/fedora installer from running? cuz i tested the DVD on another computer and it booted up correctly...