Preston Crawford wrote: >I have a nice, well-running, well behaved Fedora installation. I'm >thinking of buying Windows because I need to learn ASP.NET and Mono, for >all that it does well, has some shortcomings. Plus there's no good >editor for ASP.NET. Anyway, that's the "why would you want to do this" >part. As far as how I would do it, I have a second hard drive. I think I >can just install the second hard drive with Windows and then point Grub >at that drive as a possible boot point. Is that true? Or will Windows >want to erase the MBR of HDA and thus this won't be possible at all >unless I swap the places of the hard drives and reinstall GRUB onto the >new HDA? > >Either way, I'd like to do this (assuming I even choose to do it) in a >fashion that doesn't ruin my Linux install. > >Preston > > > > MS Windows does not like being on a secondary hard drive. My experience has been that you need to follow this procedure: 1) Take out the Fedora Harddrive 2) Replace with soon-to-be MS Windows Harddrive 3) Install Windows 4) Move the Windows Harddrive to the second bay, install Fedora Harddrive in the primary bay 5) Add an entry similar to the following to your grub.conf so that you can boot MS Windows: title Win2K map (hd1) (hd0) map (hd0) (hd1) rootnoverify (hd1,0) makeactive chainloader +1 The first two lines "swap" the primary and secondary drive, thus making Windows think it's still in the primary hard drive slot. Good luck..

On Tue, Jan 27, 2004 at 11:00:51AM -0500, Keven Ring wrote: >Preston Crawford wrote: > > > >>I have a nice, well-running, well behaved Fedora installation. I'm >>thinking of buying Windows because I need to learn ASP.NET and Mono, for >>all that it does well, has some shortcomings. Plus there's no good >>editor for ASP.NET. Anyway, that's the "why would you want to do this" >>part. As far as how I would do it, I have a second hard drive. I think I >>can just install the second hard drive with Windows and then point Grub >>at that drive as a possible boot point. Is that true? Or will Windows >>want to erase the MBR of HDA and thus this won't be possible at all >>unless I swap the places of the hard drives and reinstall GRUB onto the >>new HDA? >> >>Either way, I'd like to do this (assuming I even choose to do it) in a >>fashion that doesn't ruin my Linux install. >> >>Preston >> >> >> >> >> >> >MS Windows does not like being on a secondary hard drive. > > Not entirely. Mess-DOS and its descendants (W9x, Wme, etc.) have to boot from the primary partition of the first hard drive. NT does not descend from Mess-DOS, and can boot from any primary partition (and for all I know, perhaps any partition at all). As XP is descended from NT, it should boot from any hard drive.

>My experience has been that you need to follow this procedure: > >1) Take out the Fedora Harddrive >2) Replace with soon-to-be MS Windows Harddrive >3) Install Windows >4) Move the Windows Harddrive to the second bay, install Fedora >Harddrive in the primary bay >5) Add an entry similar to the following to your grub.conf so that you >can boot MS Windows: >title Win2K > map (hd1) (hd0) > map (hd0) (hd1) > rootnoverify (hd1,0) > makeactive > chainloader +1 > >The first two lines "swap" the primary and secondary drive, thus making >Windows think it's still in the primary hard drive slot. > >Good luck.. > > >

I have heard that Windows will wipe out the boot info for Linux if you install Windows on a box that already has Linux installed. For that reason, I've only set up dual boot systems by having the Windows OS installed first.

> I have heard that Windows will wipe out the boot info for Linux if you > install Windows on a box that already has Linux installed. this can hapen if you install the linux boot loader on the MBR then install windows.