Dualboot Linux-Windows

Friday, 09 November 2007 15:01

Here I am gonna describe how to boot Linux and Windows from two physical seperated hard disk drives.

Its a bit tricky to dual-boot from two HDDs with grub because whe have to remap the drives.
First we have to map the first hard drive to pretend to be the second. Than we map the sencond drive to pretend to be the first. Now the wired thing: When we tell Grub where to find Windows we tell grub the true disk, not the pretended one. Next we stop Grub from mounting the Windows drive. Now set the windows drive active. Last thing to do ist to invoke the windows bootloader.

Once you figured it out, it is very easy.
In my case I installed Linux on the PRIMARY Master and Windows on the PRIMARY Slave.
HDA is spit into three partitions (hda1=boot, hda2=swap, hda3=root)
So my grub.conf referes to these settings.

Install Windows (XP, 2000) on a hard disc.
Install Linux on another hard disc
Boot Linux
Configure grub.conf to contain the following:

timeout 10
default 0
fallback 1

title Gentoo-2.6
root (hd0,0)
kernel (hd0,0)/vmlinuz root=/dev/hda3

title Gentoo-2.6-old
root (hd0,0)
kernel (hd0,0)/vmlinuz.old root=/dev/hda3

title=Windows XP Pro
map (hd0) (hd1)
map (hd1) (hd0)
root (hd1,0)
rootnoverify (hd1,0)
makeactive
chainloader +1

Thats it folks.