[K12OSN] Triple Booting and Grub

Henry Hartley henryhartley at westat.com
Sun Mar 4 13:33:26 UTC 2007


This is off topic but I really have no idea where to go and thought someone here might have an answer for me.  If not, no worries.

I have a computer that has been running as a dual-boot system for a while.  I installed Windows XP and then Fedora Core (it started out at FC1 but has been upgraded and is currently at FC5).  They dual boot quite well and all has been good.

Recently, however, I found out that the copy of XP I was running was not completely legit (okay, it wasn't even partially legit).  I don't particularly like buying from Microsoft but I actually have some things I do under Windows that are needed.  I'm a part time photographer and I haven't got my workflow completely working under Linux.  Also, I share the computer with my family and the rest of them prefer WinXP.  I could have continued with this illegal copy but decided I needed to do the right thing.  I bought a copy of Windows XP with SP2.  Rather than install this over the existing copy of Windows, I thought I'd put it on a brand new hard drive.  That would give me a little time to copy things over, get them installed, etc. and my family could still boot back to the old XP in the meantime.  Once everything was working with the new version of XP, I'd clean off the old partition.  I disconnected the old OS drive (so I wouldn't overwrite anything by accident) and the installation went fine.  Then, I reconnected the old drive and booted to Linux.  So far, so good.  I added what I thought grub.conf would need but now, I can only boot to Linux or to the old XP partition.  

Both WinXP (the old version) and FC5 are on the same drive, hda.  The second drive, hdb, is a data drive that primarily holds photographs and video and is formatted as NTFS and used by Windows.  The new drive with the new, legal copy of WinXP is hdc and it was made into one, single partition (see fdisk results below).  I thought all I'd need to do is add a section to grub.conf using (hd2,0) instead of (hd0,0) and I'd be able to boot to either version of Windows but all three WinXP settings in the file (using hd0, hd1, and hd2 -- see below) cause the old version of Windows to load.  So, as I said, I know this isn't really a Linux problem and certainly not a K12LTSP problem but if anyone has any suggestions I'd be most grateful.  Thoughts?

-- START fdisk LIST------------------------------------------------
[root at localhost ~]# fdisk -l

Disk /dev/hda: 80.0 GB, 80026361856 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 9729 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hda1   *           1        2550    20482843+   7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/hda2            2551        2563      104422+  83  Linux
/dev/hda3            2564        9729    57560895   8e  Linux LVM

Disk /dev/hdb: 80.0 GB, 80026361856 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 9729 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hdb1               1        9729    78148161    7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/hdb4   *           1           1           0    0  Empty
Partition 4 does not end on cylinder boundary.

Disk /dev/hdc: 80.0 GB, 80026361856 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 9729 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hdc1               1        9728    78140128+   7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/hdc4   *           1           1           0    0  Empty
Partition 4 does not end on cylinder boundary.

Disk /dev/dm-0: 57.8 GB, 57814286336 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 7028 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Disk /dev/dm-0 doesn't contain a valid partition table

Disk /dev/dm-1: 1073 MB, 1073741824 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 130 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Disk /dev/dm-1 doesn't contain a valid partition table
-- END ------------------------------------------------------------

-- START grub.conf LIST -------------------------------------------
default=0
timeout=15
splashimage=(hd0,1)/grub/splash.xpm.gz
title Fedora Core (2.6.19-1.2288.2.1.fc5)
        root (hd0,1)
        kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.19-1.2288.2.1.fc5 ro root=/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 rhgb quiet
        initrd /initrd-2.6.19-1.2288.2.1.fc5.img
title Fedora Core (2.6.19-1.2288.fc5)
        root (hd0,1)
        kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.19-1.2288.fc5 ro root=/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 rhgb quiet
        initrd /initrd-2.6.19-1.2288.fc5.img
title Windows XP NEW (hd2,0)
        rootnoverify (hd2,0)
        makeactive
        chainloader +1
title Windows XP NEW (hd1,0) (Should not do anything)
        rootnoverify (hd1,0)
        makeactive
        chainloader +1
title Windows XP old (hd0,0)
        rootnoverify (hd0,0)
        chainloader +1

-- END ------------------------------------------------------------


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