Adding Windows 2000 into a dual-boot after the fact?

[John V. Pope]

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.
> 
> 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..
> 

Preston,

Since it's unlikely you will be installing .NET on a non-XP system the gymnastics
of mapping the drives shouln't be needed.  I currently run a dual boot system with
WindowsXP running on the secondary drive.  Works fine.

John V. Pope