booting F14 on 2nd drive on a Windows 7 PC

[Michael Wiktowy]

On Thu, May 19, 2011 at 5:25 PM, FHDATA <fhdata at unm.edu> wrote:
>
> Greetings,
>
> Sorry if this is a newbie question....
>
> A. Recently purchased PC has 2 physical drives (let's
>    call them  p0 , p1).
>
> B. p0 has windows 7 ; p1 is blank never been used.
>
> C. I used F14 32bit install media and it sees
>    p0  as /dev/sda1 and it sees p1 as /dev/adb
>
> D. Fedora 14 install completes successfully....
>    During which it was instructed to install
>    boot loader onto p1 and to leave alone /dev/sda1  ...
>
> E. BIOS knows that it needs to boot to p1
>
> F. I get a blinking prompt and nothing else....

... a blinking Grub> prompt?

> Can I have a system as stated above so I can boot
> to p1 with linux on it without p0 ever being touched
> in any way.... ?
>
> If not, why not?
>
> If yes, how?

I think that it can be done but it is all up to your BIOS support.
Some BIOSes will boot to the second drive by pretending that the
second drive is the first in order to fake-out the OS that is
installed on it that doesn't support booting from the second drive.

If you have a Grub prompt then you might be able to do some grub magic
in order to find the root partition and switch it back. Or options in
your BIOS might be available to tell it that the second drive
understands booting from the second drive.

However, without more information regarding your grub.conf and your
BIOS options, it will be difficult for someone to help you.

/Mike