XP on 1 and Mint x64 on 2 HDD-no GRUB on 1st HDD. Possible?

[Raffael]

Okay, this is bit complicated situation.

I have 2 HDD. One on SATA with Windows XP and the second on IDE with Linux.

Since Linux Mint 5 I've been having a problem with busybox (the booting process would end on it and go no further). This is a result of installing Linux Mint on second HDD while the first drive was disconnected (disabled SATA in BIOS). This way Linux would not place any GRUB or such thing on the SATA drive and I would choose the drive to boot through mobo's boot menu. Unluckily enabling SATA and trying to log in after the installation would end up with "Busybox:{initramfs}". Adding some parameters (all_generic_ide irqpoll floppy=off) would work, but it's not the right solution.

Why am I asking for help? Because the same problem occurs with Linux Mint 7 (x64).

I think that maybe all would work well if I would install Linux without disabling SATA so Linux would be aware of presence of the SATA drive during the installation which would influence GRUB.
So generally I would like to install LM on second HDD but without placing GRUB on first HDD (the one with Windows). Is it possible?

Or maybe there is a solution to the busybox problem of which I'm unaware of?

By the way, I love Linux Mint

I know the busybox was discussed here: http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.p ... 0&start=60 but the topic is dead and problem is still active unfortunately.

[lagagnon]

If I were you I would simply save your present /boot/grub/menu.lst file, install LM, let it re-install grub (it will find all your OS's and make a menu for them) - then if you need to edit the boot menu just copy appropriate lines over from your old menu.lst file.

[Aging Technogeek]

Using one SATA and one IDE drive in the same computer to dual boot is difficult because the Bios and Grub don't always agree on which drive is the master (where the system looks for boot information). See this article in the Mint Wiki for detailed explanation and possible fixes:

http://linuxmint.com/wiki/index.php/If_ ... annot_boot

[Raffael]

Thanks for the advice. I'm going to test UUID in my situation, it should resolve the issue.

[Raffael]

Luckily I've managed to fix the problem Although the solution is quite silly (or it was silly no to try this earlier).
I've changed the root=/dev/sda1 in menu.lst to root=/dev/sdb1 and tadam! Everything works perfectly
At last I'm free from this stupid error. And the UUID caused a strange crash, so it's better not to use it.

Thanks for help. I hope that if anyone else that encounter this issue will find solution in this topic.