Dual boot - Different harddrives

[AK Dave]

So you HAVE Mint installed, installed XP on a different drive, and now you don't have grub as a bootloader. You should not have to play with your bios to dual-boot; you SHOULD have grub. Screwing around with master/slave options in bios just adds a layer of variability that is unnecessary, so knock it off. Use grub. You need to restore grub, which should have been installed by default with your original Mint install.

I think this is what you want:
http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/ubuntu/r ... es-it-out/
Or:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=224351

[AK Dave]

If the XP partition is formatted as NTFS then the menu.lst command needs to reference it as a ntfs-3g partition.

Post your menu.lst for grub in a

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code window

[AK Dave]

Okay, that menu.lst SHOULD work. But it doesn't. Because XP is stupid.

Problem:
a. you installed XP on a drive that was at that time identified as "hd0".
b. you installed Mint on a drive that was at that time identified as "hd0".
c. you've been using BIOS switching to flipflop the drive order to dualboot.

You're now trying to convince XP to boot on "hd1". I believe that is exactly the problem. Are you using SATA drives, perchance?

Here's an idea:
Set your BIOS so that the XP drive is master (hd0), Mint as slave (hd1). Boot with grub LiveCD. Install grub to the MBR of hd0. You'll then have a grub where the meat of it looks like this:

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## ## End Default Options ##

title      Linux Mint, kernel 2.6.24-16-generic
root      (hd1,0)
kernel      /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.24-16-generic root=/dev/sda1 ro quiet splash
initrd      /boot/initrd.img-2.6.24-16-generic

title      Linux Mint, kernel 2.6.24-16-generic (recovery mode)
root      (hd1,0)
kernel      /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.24-16-generic root=/dev/sda1 ro single
initrd      /boot/initrd.img-2.6.24-16-generic

title      Linux Mint, kernel memtest86+
root      (hd1,0)
kernel      /boot/memtest86+.bin

### END DEBIAN AUTOMAGIC KERNELS LIST

title Windows XP
   root (hd0,0)
   makeactive
   chainloader +1

[AK Dave]

Your struggle was caused by the fact that you had previously been playing with master/slave settings in bios instead of using grub.

But in the end your re-install option leads to the same end result. I was simply trying to direct you to that same place without asking you to reinstall either XP or Mint.