Booting Linux and Vista from separate hd's

[confused]

Hi All,

I have recently installed Felicia and Vista on separate hard drives but can't get GRUB to dual boot. Grub lists Felicia and Vista but will only boot into Felicia. The problem appears to be within Vista as Grub attempts the boot but an incompatibility error is returned . Has anyone tried dual booting these programmes from separate hard drives?


regards
confused

[kansasnoob]

Hi All,

I have recently installed Felicia and Vista on separate hard drives but can't get GRUB to dual boot. Grub lists Felicia and Vista but will only boot into Felicia. The problem appears to be within Vista as Grub attempts the boot but an incompatibility error is returned . Has anyone tried dual booting these programmes from separate hard drives?


regards
confused

Exactly what error(s) are displayed when you try to boot Vista. If it's a Grub error it will usually display a number.

We'll probably also need to see the output from Terminal of:

Code: Select all

sudo fdisk -l

That's a lower case L.

Also the output of:

Code: Select all

cat /boot/grub/menu.lst

Once again that's a lower case L, like Menu List.

Hopefully we'll just need to edit the menu list to chainload Windows. This procedure is discussed here:

http://users.bigpond.net.au/hermanzone/ ... p_commands

It can be tricky.

It could also be a Vista problem. Let's hope not!

[curt_grymala]

If the systems are installed on separate hard drives, have you tried using your bios to choose which drive to boot? When I initially dual-booted on my computer, I didn't use Grub to boot, I simply selected the appropriate drive from my bios.

[Fred]

Alastar wrote:

Grub can only be used on a hard disk with 2 operating systems on it.

This patently untrue! There is no limit to the number of operating systems grub can boot.

I haven't followed this thread but as a general rule of thumb, it is a bad idea to swap hard drives around in BIOS to boot them. Grub is quite capable of managing this in a saner way than the BIOS select.

Fred

[Fred]

Alastar,

Not trying to be difficult, really. Actually, grub doesn't have the limitations you ascribe to it. Generally it is the installers of various distros that fail to recognize multiple partitions on multiple drives. This is a problem I am especially familiar with in the Ubuntu installer.

The Ubuntu installer is one of the poorest of the bunch, which Mint uses. When you have a system with several drives and multiple partitions on each I suggest you download the latest stable version of the Gparted live cd iso, (link below). If you use this to make your partitions and then when making the install use the manual mode and assign the pre-made partitions in the installer you stand a much better chance of winding up with a successful install that picks up everything.

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfile ... _id=271779

Fred