DPRG mailing list archives: [DPRG] Fwd: OT

Sat May 3 08:32:29 CDT 2008

Hi Chuck,

Appreciate the advice.  I had a dual-boot system years ago that worked
like this:  I bought two identical hard drives, installed different
OSs on them, and on boot-up went to BIOS setup and selected the boot
drive I wanted to use.  Some people said this wasn't a good idea, but
it worked fine (I don't think I'd try it with non-identical HDs).

Best,
Jeff

On Sun, Apr 27, 2008 at 3:15 PM, Chuck McManis <cmcmanis at mcmanis.com> wrote:
> At 09:07 AM 4/27/2008, you wrote:
>
> > Oops, I hit "send" accidentally.
> >
> >
> > I'd like to configure my PC to dual-boot with either Ubuntu Linux or
> > Windows.  I set a separate partition on the primary drive before I
> > installed Windows XP.
> >
>
>  I guess the question is what you're trying to achieve with the dual boot
> setup. I've found that drives are so cheap these days that I can set up a
> machine with a removable drive carrier that lets me add in an alternative
> operating system.
>
>  What I've found is that most BIOSes try to boot from drive 0. Further when
> they are probing they probe channel A first then channel B. So on machines
> with older motherboards you can set up the following:
>
>  IDE A - Master Optical Drive (I've got a Plextor DVD drive here)
>  IDE A - Slave - Connect the Removable Drive here
>  IDE B - Master Hard drive with your "main" OS goes here.
>  IDE B - Slave - Hard drive with "user" data goes here (can also use USB
> drive)
>
>  The BIOS will probe this when there is no removable drive installed and
> boot from the IDE-B master (first hard drive found). But if you install a
> hard drive it will be preferentially booted.
>
>  I used this setup on my kids computers for a long time where I installed
> Windows and all their games on the other drive then installed FreeBSD on an
> installable drive and imaged the other drive to the FreeBSD drive with
> dd(1). Then any complaints about "configuration problem" or "doesn't boot"
> and I'd plug in my FreeBSD drive, re-image the other hard drive and reboot,
> voila no more problems (until something else screwed it up) On my Linux
> desktop I use that same setup to boot into XP on those occasions when I
> want XP to run on that machine.
>
>  I found this also works with SATA drives but you need to find out what
> order the BIOS preferentially puts things into (which interface does it
> consider disk 0, disk 1, etc.)
>
>  The advent of BIOS' that will boot from USB attached drives makes this
> easier still.
>
>  --Chuck
>
>