booting F14 on 2nd drive on a Windows 7 PC

Tim ignored_mailbox at yahoo.com.au
Fri May 20 14:54:28 UTC 2011


On Thu, 2011-05-19 at 14:25 -0600, FHDATA wrote:
> 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.

Presuming that before installing Linux onto the second drive, that the
computer worked as expected (boots up to Windows on the first drive,
even with the second unused drive attached).

It could be that the computer thinks drive one and two are around the
other way, it tried to boot from drive one, found no bootable OS, and
booted from the second one.

Simple step to take:  Swap drive cables between the drives.  See what
happens.

NB:  Telling the BIOS that drive one is drive two, and drive two is
drive one, doesn't always work.  Sometimes they get swapped as far as
the BIOS selecting the other drive to boot from.  But aren't regarded as
swapped by the OS that is booted.

The stalling at a blinking prompt sounds rather like the problem I've
just outlined in the above paragraph.

> 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.... ?

It is possible.  There are several ways.  Here's just three of them:

1. Depending on your BIOS you can choose which drive to boot, from it,
each time.  Though, depending on your BIOS, you can wear it out by
keeping on changing its settings.  It depends on whether you're
resetting which drive is which, or it's simply a boot choice which
doesn't store a setting.

2. You can copy the bootblock from the Linux drive as a file onto the
Windows drive (this will only need doing once), and then add to the
Windows boot menu an option to boot from that bootblock.  Making Windows
your boot menu controller.

3. If you can sort out which drives are which, and your BIOS doesn't
confuse things, and get Linux to boot up.  You can make your Linux drive
your boot drive, and have its boot menu pick whether to boot Windows or
Linux.

Think about it, do some experimenting, then concentrate on just one of
them.

-- 
[tim at localhost ~]$ uname -r
2.6.27.25-78.2.56.fc9.i686

Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored.  I
read messages from the public lists.





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