booting F14 on 2nd drive on a Windows 7 PC

[Tim]

On Sat, 2011-05-21 at 00:24 +0930, Tim wrote:
> 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.

A bit more info:  That sort of thing can happen for reasons outlined by
other posters.  As well as what I've already said, during installation,
you boot from a CD or DVD, and this can change which drives are regarded
as drive one or two, differently from how their counted when you haven't
booted from a CD/DVD.

When your picking drives to format, install to, and write bootloaders
to, carefully check which drives you're working on.  This is easier to
tell if they're different makes, models, or sizes.  As, generally, at
least some part of that information is presented during the process.

Back when I bothered with dual booting, I used to unplug the Windows
drive during the installation and set up.

 ... 

Following on from my prior posting.  Perhaps, if your BIOS is painful,
you might want to re-arrange drives so that Linux is drive one, and
Windows drive two.  The GRUB menu file for choosing which drive to boot
can include commands to pseudo-swap drives one and two around, to make
one of the OSs happy, if they insist on believing that *they're* on
drive one.

e.g. title LemonOS (Windows)
        map (hd0) (hd1)
        map (hd1) (hd0)
        rootnoverify (hd0,0)
        chainloader +1

The "rootnoverify" referring to the Windows partition, so you'd set the
hdX,Y drive and partition numerical options to suit your system's
drives, rather than mine.

Where you do most of the fiddling around, regarding drive numbering,
will depend rather on whether the OS in question boots through the BIOS,
or the BIOS hands the baton on and it boots itself.

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

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