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Re: Installing Mint with XP, dual drives

Posted: Mon Mar 30, 2009 7:24 pm
by AK Dave
bzaremsky wrote: most (if not all) HOWTOs and tutorials seem to speak a great deal about resizing partitions and such and thus leave out a setup like I have.
Thats because your setup is more problematic, not less popular. Lots of people have multiple drives. Until you know what you're doing, you should stick with the tutorials. Repartition the #1 drive, put both OS on the same drive, use the #2 drive for data.

Re: Installing Mint with XP, dual drives

Posted: Tue Mar 31, 2009 6:00 am
by Nicholas
Actually, since Mint is installed on the drive you cannot access at this time - with the sata switch, you should be able to boot into the installed OS in that drive without any trouble. When you change drives - only the one being used is on - the other one is turned off. The only drawback I have noticed using the switch is that for some reason - the system clocks on both computers display incorrect time after switching drives, if you only use one drive, it's ok, it only gets screwed up when you work with one - then the other. It's easy to adjust the time - but it's weird that it happens at all. Otherwise, it is fine, since neither drive is aware of the other. I use a USB drive to transfer files from one drive to the other.

Re: Installing Mint with XP, dual drives

Posted: Tue Mar 31, 2009 7:14 am
by Alpha-Geek
I've done this before. However, when my computer boots, the BIOS allows me to hit F12 to select the boot drive. As long as you tell Linux to write GRUB to your Linux drive, it worked fine. As far as the time thing goes, if you turn UTC auto set "off" in your Linux install, the time will stay properly set.

Re: Installing Mint with XP, dual drives

Posted: Tue Mar 31, 2009 12:54 pm
by AK Dave
Hmm... good point, Alpha-Geek. Its not that grub is the problem, but perhaps he wrote grub to the wrong drive. By default, grub is going to write itself to the first drive. Unless he knew to select the Advanced option on grub install, it would have gone there.

bzaremsky: I didn't mean to insult your technical experience and intelligence, but I did default to "must be a noob" because the typical Windows user mindset is "seperate drive for each OS" with limited understanding of the concept of partitioning. Regardless of your experience with other single-OS linux installs, multiple install configurations are sometimes tricky.