I have a nice, well-running, well behaved Fedora installation.
I'm
thinking of buying Windows because I need to learn
ASP.NET and Mono, for
all that it does well, has some shortcomings. Plus there's no good
editor for
ASP.NET. Anyway, that's the "why would you want to do this"
part. As far as how I would do it, I have a second hard drive. I think I
can just install the second hard drive with Windows and then point Grub
at that drive as a possible boot point. Is that true? Or will Windows
want to erase the MBR of HDA and thus this won't be possible at all
unless I swap the places of the hard drives and reinstall GRUB onto the
new HDA?
Either way, I'd like to do this (assuming I even choose to do it) in a
fashion that doesn't ruin my Linux install.
Preston
MS Windows does not like being on a secondary hard drive.
My experience has been that you need to follow this procedure:
1) Take out the Fedora Harddrive
2) Replace with soon-to-be MS Windows Harddrive
3) Install Windows
4) Move the Windows Harddrive to the second bay, install Fedora
Harddrive in the primary bay
5) Add an entry similar to the following to your grub.conf so that you
can boot MS Windows:
title Win2K
map (hd1) (hd0)
map (hd0) (hd1)
rootnoverify (hd1,0)
makeactive
chainloader +1
The first two lines "swap" the primary and secondary drive, thus making
Windows think it's still in the primary hard drive slot.
Good luck..