F8/F9 Multiboot question

[Daniel B. Thurman]

Lyvim Xaphir wrote:
>
> On Mon, 2008-08-11 at 16:50 -0400, Tom Horsley wrote:
> > On Mon, 11 Aug 2008 08:36:43 -0700
> > "Daniel B. Thurman" <dant at cdkkt.com> wrote:
> >
> > > I cannot
> > > figure out why I cannot get the chain-loaders to work for w2kPro
> > > and XP, but it works for Vista now (go figure!).
> >
> > It is entirely possible that XP and W2K will only boot if they
> > believe they live on the primary disk. Could be (not sure) that
> > the only way to use grub for everything is if the main grub
> > partition with all the chainloader specs is on the same disk
> > with XP.
>
> That's not true, the grub can be installed to the mbr of an sda and the
> chainloader can be configured to boot xp on sdb.  I've done this in
> several cases.
>
As I pointed out, I was ABLE to boot w2kPro, XP, and Vista
ONLY if my BIOs is set to boot Windows-Drive as the
Primary boot drive. Heck - the boot-loader IS Grub! It WORKS
and note that the boot-win is a logical partition! As the table
shows, for the Windows drive, partition-1 is w2kPro, 2nd is XP,
3rd is Vista, 5th is boot-win, and 6th is w-App1

The problem is, that if I switch via BIOs primary boot drive
to a Fedora-ONLY drive for which the generic boot-sys has
chain-loader entries, Grub sees F8, F9, and Vista - but does
not see w2kPro nor XP!

What I also found oddly enough was that using the Fedora drive
as the primary - I grub edited the w2kPro line and changed root(hd1.0)
to root (hd1,4), effect I was calling  boot-win, and it does come up with
grub but the splash screen was missing only because of boot-win's assignment
is based on hd(0,0) which is not the cause when booting off the Fedora drive
which is actually hd0,0!  So, for fun, I attempted to grub-edit the 
boot-win's
w2kPro entry only to find that in edit mode, the text was scrambled - so it
wasn't possible to edit this entry in order to test it out - so I 
dropped it. Seems
that grub does not like "cross-drive" entries?

I will try and test out the concept of moving XP into the 5th partition 
of the
windows drive, stealing from w-App1 and see what that looks like.  I 
like the
idea of having a single primary/extended partition for which all OS's can be
logically assigned therein and not worry too much about running out of 
primary
partitions, but I wonder what the "penalty" is in doing so?
>
> > The fact that vista will boot leads me to suspect
> > this may be the case, vista's boot code may not be as braindamaged
> > as XP and W2k. The last time I had linux and XP on the same system,
> > they were both on the same disk with grub and I had no problems
> > (other than the problem that I couldn't install XP at all if
> > there was an ext3 partition anywhere on any sata disk, but I solved 
> that
> > by wiping all the disks clean and installing XP first :-).
>
> When XP is installed first, it really ought to be put on the last
> cylinders of the hard drive, say a primary of sda2, and set up sda1 as
> an extended partition with logicals for fedora installation.  Wnen
> fedora installs, it will see xp on sda2 and set up an "other" for it.
>
Why?  I started with a "blank-state" drive (i.e. a raw drive),
and installed in order: w2kPro, XP, then Vista but only
by assigning active partitions before using the install CD
so and what is the difference of having Fedora (or any partition
manager) first lay down the NTFS partition before installing the
boot CDs? By making each partition active before installing
an OS - it constrains the OS to the partition and more importantly,
it recognized the "active" partition as "C:" - I was able to test and
verify this. But in the case of w2kPro - the problem you run into is
the LBA limit - so your 1/2/3rd partition MUST be within the
132XXX space confines and once you finish installing w2kPro,
don't forget to set the registry for w2kPro with the EnableBigLba
DWORD=1, from whence the other OS's (XP/Vista) takes care of
itself, or so it seems.
>
> XP does not have to be on the primary drive in order to work tho.  You
> could just as easily put linux on an sda and throw xp on an sdb.  The
> trick is to get the ntfs partition setup and formatted first, before you
> boot the xp install disk.
>
See comments above.
>
> This is true for both XP32 and XP64 editions.
>
See comments above.

I am still confused as to why using the Grub on a Primary boot
drive fails to see w2kPro/XP on a secondary drive but sees
Vista!?  So, I wonder where the real problem is....

Dan