akimball 0 Posted June 5, 2006 Hi all, I've been through the dual-boot scenario a zillion times, but never with a primary SATA and SuSE on the primary IDE. I originally want to get to the point of triple booting my machine (Linux, Windoze, OSX) - but first things first. I installed Grub on the /boot partition rather than the MBR since I've had too many problems gettings the old Windows MBR back when I wanted to kill my linux install. I did the normal dd trick of copying the boot sectors to a bin file and them mcopy'd them to a file that I put in boot.ini on Windows. However, windows refuses to boot it, I just get a round-trip back through the bios and the same screen. My first thought was that this is due to the SATA/IDE issue. Maybe so, maybe not. Then I did the ultimate dangerous thing and resized my SATA drive to have a small primary partition so that I could put the SuSE boot partition on it. I've had partition magic fail on me before so I hated doing it, but it worked. I should mention that the new partition on the SATA drive is at the end of the 75GB drive (Raptor). I hope they've resolved the issue of boot partitions being past a certain sector. So, ideally, I just want this to work - w/o GRUB. My first idea was to somehow change the SuSE partition table to have it point to the SATA drive for /boot and copy over everything from the /boot on the IDE to /boot on the SATA. However I realized, I don't know how to do either one! The expert options in SuSE didn't have a tool for redoing the partition table, so I got stuck there. Nor did I know how to format/clone the boot partition on the SATA. Ugh. So, can some kind soul help me out? I just want a clean booting machine. BTW: If you read the Tom's Hardware article about the new Intel 805 processor being oc'd to 4.0Ghz - believe it. I didn't opt for an expensive motherboard (I bought a cheap Asus board) but opted for $$ memory. I'm running at 4.0Ghz w/o water! Just lots of 120mm fans and a P180 Antec case. So, if you are thinking about it, do it! I'll help you if you help me. Take care, Adam Share this post Link to post
danleff 0 Posted June 6, 2006 Quote: I installed Grub on the /boot partition rather than the MBR since I've had too many problems gettings the old Windows MBR back when I wanted to kill my linux install. I did the normal dd trick of copying the boot sectors to a bin file and them mcopy'd them to a file that I put in boot.ini on Windows. However, windows refuses to boot it, I just get a round-trip back through the bios and the same screen. Can you point me to the directions that you used to do this? you can use the boot.ini modifications, if it is done right. Remember, you installed suSE to the IDE drive (which is probably set in the bios as the second boot drive) and the data that you copied over assumes that the IDE drive is first, since placing grub on the second drive's boot partiton assumes that it is the only drive in the system. So now, the boot.ini, when invoked by grub with the modified files that you copied over, is looking for windows in the wrong place. If I have this correctly, you can boot windows from the MBR (you get the windows boot.ini login screen choices}, but when you pick the Linux option, you get the grub menu, but can't boot windows from there? If this is not the case, you mucked up the system. When you boot, do you get the windows boot.ini choices, or pure grub? Share this post Link to post
