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

[Keven Ring]

Charles Curley wrote:

>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.
>>    
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>
>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.
>
Having attempted that proceedure about a year and a half ago [obviously 
before Fedora], to install Win2K, I would beg to differ.

Having installed Linux on the primary hard drive, and obtaining a second 
hard drive onto which I could install Windows, the installer indicated 
that it required installation on the primary drive, which contained 0 
free disk space.  Of course all of the partitions on the primary hard 
drive were used by Linux.

Once Win2K was installed, I swapped the hard drives back.  In the grub 
boot loader, the entries did not map hd1 to hd0 and vice versa.  Linux 
would boot just fine, but Windows always complained, and would not 
start.  Then I mapped hd1 to hd0 and everything worked just fine.

Of course, YMMV.  I certainly would not have gone through the trouble of 
disconnecting and reconnecting harddrives if I didn't need to.  If one 
wants to try and install Win[2K, XP] on a second hard drive, and has 
success, more power to them.  I am relating my experience, nothing more.

>
>  
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>>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..
>>
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