Re: Strange dual boot difficulties (XP and Mint 5) - need advice
Posted: Sun Jun 01, 2008 6:48 am
This post is so long that I lost track of what you did....
Anyway
when you first installed Mint it installed grub to (hd0) which is the MBR of the disk Mint is on - neither Mint nor any other Linux can know that you have other disks with an OS on that are first in the BIOS boot order - so the grub was correct and you should leave it at that - ie chainload XP from the 80 GB disk
When this happened "However, upon rebooting, the computer loaded straight into XP." this was because grub was on another MBR than the one first in boot sequence as you suspected
So you now have to change the settings in menu.lst for XP
Remember XP can't boot from "anywhere" you have trick it into believing that it boots from C
Because of this you may have ntldr on what was the first disk at some time and xp on another - but that should not matter....
You must have something like
You could boot into Mint and look at the other disks to find out where XP is and if ntldr is on the same disk
Anyway
when you first installed Mint it installed grub to (hd0) which is the MBR of the disk Mint is on - neither Mint nor any other Linux can know that you have other disks with an OS on that are first in the BIOS boot order - so the grub was correct and you should leave it at that - ie chainload XP from the 80 GB disk
When this happened "However, upon rebooting, the computer loaded straight into XP." this was because grub was on another MBR than the one first in boot sequence as you suspected
So you now have to change the settings in menu.lst for XP
Remember XP can't boot from "anywhere" you have trick it into believing that it boots from C
Because of this you may have ntldr on what was the first disk at some time and xp on another - but that should not matter....
You must have something like
The (hd0) always to be in the same place and in the other places the (hdx) of the Windows diskmap (hd0) (hd1)
map (hd1) (hd0)
You could boot into Mint and look at the other disks to find out where XP is and if ntldr is on the same disk