[K12OSN] Dual boot using separate hard drives

[Petre Scheie]

I don't think you need to 'leave' any space for the boot loader; when a boot loader is 
installed it goes at the beginning of the disk independent of the partitioning and of 
the OS, IIRC.  Most distros, Fedora/RH included, handle the config of the boot loader 
for you automatically.  Note that you can also use the Windows boot loader to load 
Linux.  You can find a bunch of documents about doing this on the web; google for, say, 
'windows dual-boot'.

Petre

John P. Conlon wrote:
> I have the drives, I do not have the money to buy a set of caddies. 
> Besides that woild not help where my wife is concerned because 
> eventually I would forget to switch drives.  I do need the file swapping 
> ability also.
> 
> Gavin Chester wrote:
> 
>>On Thu, 2005-06-02 at 10:06 -0600, John P. Conlon wrote:
>>  
>>
>>>To ensure marital harmony and bliss I am about to put together a dual 
>>>boot machine using 2 hard drives.  The plan is for one drive to be 
>>>Windows XP and the other to be K12LTSP as a stand alone.  When I fdisk 
>>>the windows drive do I need to leave a small portion of the drive for 
>>>Grub to be installed in?  If I do need to leave some how big does the 
>>>piece need to be?
>>>
>>>Thanks
>>>Pat
>>>
>>>    
>>>
>>
>>This may not be the answer you're looking for, but FWIW I find great
>>service in putting each drive in a harddrive caddy.  You don't specify
>>your drive type in your post, but these caddies have been available for
>>SCSI and IDE for some time, and are now available for SATA.  Everything
>>is simplified to deciding which drive - Windows or Linux - to pop in at
>>the time of bootup to totally change the personality of the PC.  This
>>assumes you go through a complete install of each system on each
>>drive.  
>>
>>The only drawback of this is that you can't exchange files between
>>systems on each drive.  If you need that then you do need to have both
>>drives active as master and slave (assuming IDE or SATA) at once.  In
>>that case simply ensure you have Windows installed on your primary drive
>>and then start your Linux install and the installation will take care of
>>creating the appropriate boot partition for grub or lilo without
>>touching your Windows setup.  HTH.  
>>
>>I hope that's up to date with current procedures - I haven't had to do
>>what you're attempting for a few years ;-) 
>>
>>  
>>
> 
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