Dual Boot Mint & XP on separate hard drives

[dickster]

Hi There
I am just looking for a bit of advice. I removed Windows from my system altogether and changed over to Mint 6 a few months ago.

Reluctantly, I now need to re-install Windows XP onto my system mainly for my daughter to play games etc. I have tried playonlinux, virtualbox but without success. I have also partitioned my main HDD with the plan to install Windows on that but the Windows installer refuses to work cause it doesn't have access to sector one of my HDD.

I am planning on buying a second hard drive for the Windows install because I don't want the Windows 'Bloat' to slow down Mint.

Subject to any advice to the contrary my evil plan is as follows -

Install second HDD
Change BIOS settings so that the second HDD is the primary boot drive
Disconnect the current HDD with the Mint Installation
Install Windows XP to the second drive
Change the BIOS settings again so that the HDD with the Mint Installation becomes the primary boot

I will then need to set up Grub accordingly, but I will cross that bridge when I get to it.

Does anyone foresee any issues with this approach? I think this should make the Windows installer happy cause it will think it is the only 'precious' OS on my system

Your thoughts & advice would be appreciated

Cheers
Dickster

[DrHu]

The sequence you describe, sounds fine
--fixing grub or switching drives and fixing grub(installing to windows MBR), would also work, then you would have the Mint (Grub) menu loading windows and Mint, you could setup windows or Mint as the default (first) menu selection ..

Another idea..
Setup a NAS system, and use a vnc connection to log into the windows OS & files to run games

[dickster]

Hi Dr Hu,

Thanks for your help. NAS might be stretching my boundaries a bit at this stage. My ultimate plan is to have this PC setup and a couple of laptops set up as a MythTV frontend so I might leave NAS until then.

I'll let you know if my plan comes together or not.

Cheers
Dickster

[dickster]

Hi There,

I just realised that I have never posted on whether this worked okay or not. I am pleased to say that it did work fine and was relatively easy to get set up Grub.
Mint 7 now sits as my primary application, with the option to go into Windows XP on the second HDD if need be. The only issue I had was that for some reason the Windows HDD only appears at 137GB instead of 320GB. I had an old Windows XP install disk so I think this maybe something to do with the problem.

I haven't really looked into it as yet, but it does seem to be a common problem. Anyhoo, other than that all was good.

Cheers
Dickster