Situation: 1 master, 1 slave hard drive Master drive has: -Weird "Dell" partition 1st -Big "Wintendo" partition 2nd Slave drive has: -Hopefully working Gentoo Linux install (/boot=1st, swap=2nd, root=3rd partition) I'm currently booting using LILO--a leftover from a Mandrake 10.0 install (which was on the slave drive before Gentoo shoved in). I'm (still) able to boot into Windows fine, and before I blew away all the Mandrake partitions, LILO started Linux fine too. I appear to be booting from the MBR on my master drive (2nd drive was wiped out totally, I believe). I'd like to update it so I can boot to Windows and Gentoo--what are my options? Gentoo already has a GRUB bootloader setup on the slave drive, which if I made minimal effort to, I could probably setup so it can also boot to Windows on the other drive...maybe? If I were to swap my master/slave drives with each other and make the Gentoo/Grub drive the master, hopefully being able to boot into the windows slave drive from there... err, would that work or would I be wasting my time playing with IDE cables? Or...any other options?

Switching them would be a good idea, AFAIK you can't use the WinNT bootloader to load a non-Windows OS on another drive (putting just the /boot on the same drive works though).

If you switch, just set up GRUB to chainload the Windows partition, that should work, hm?

Boot into gentoo, make a new lilo.conf and run lilo?

sorry to hijack the thread, but is it possible to use grub to create boot a floppy image (for use with CD-ROM floppy boot emulation) without actually having a physical floppy drive?

Perhaps this may be of help, you can just do the same things, and possibly make an CD out of it if you want, using mkisofs.

[ No. Go away. --Sneftel ]

Something happened and I lost my entire post. Great....

Well, thanks for the helpful reply...

I can't boot into Gentoo to do anything with lilo.conf, otherwise I would. :( (Anyway that drive has grub now, not lilo.)

I'll see about switching the drives when I get time to try it...

You can't boot into gentoo? Have someone make a boot-disk for you, or use the installation-cd if you've got one.

This is my config:

Drive 1(30GB): 30GB: Windows XP FAT32Drive 2(160GB): 140 GB: FAT32                20 GB: Linux 

GRUB is installed on the linux partition

I used Bootpart along with the NT bootloader to boot up linux when I happen to need it. It works perfectly.

At the moment I have no knowledge of how to make grub boot linux automatically without typing some annoying command. Since I forgot what that was, I might have to re-install linux, lol...

[Edited by - matt_j on August 31, 2004 12:37:06 PM]

I have a similar setup. Here's my advice. First, use your livecd to get back to your gentoo installation (mount your boot, root, etc. and then chroot) and install grub on the mbr (by just following gentoo's installation guide). Then, when grub is installed and setup, in you grub.conf file, you will want to have this for your windows option:

title=Windows
rootnoverify (hd0,0) #I believe this will be (hd0,1) for you
#since you mentioned the odd "Dell" partition.
chainloader +1

Basically, its what is in the gentoo install guide. I'm sure there are other ways to do it (mine seems to change each time I've installed gentoo). That should work, though. I hope it helps.

Glenn Murphy