RE: [gentoo-user] Windows on a second drive?

["Michael Kintzios" <michaelkintzios@lycos.co.uk>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Neil Bothwick [mailto:neil@digimed.co.uk] 
> Sent: 06 September 2005 08:59
> To: gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org
> Subject: Re: [gentoo-user] Windows on a second drive?
> 
> 
> On Mon, 5 Sep 2005 19:33:01 -0700, Mark Knecht wrote:
> 
> > Even though it says [MBR] above it won't proceed without creating at
> > least one partition on drive 0. It appears I cannot install 
> Windows XP
> > on a second drive without writing 30MB to the boot drive?

The easiest solution to this problem is to do as another poster
suggested:  Remove all drives, jumper your WinXP drive as master and
install WinXP on its own.  Then re-arrange and rejumper the drives as
you like, reset the BIOS settings to recognise the new drive sequence,
and finally use fdisk to check that the WinXP partition is set with the
active boot flag 'a', your grub.conf is as per the handbook for
multibooting WinXP and your fstab is adjusted accordingly for the
corresponding Gentoo and WinXP partitions.

With regards to the Grub commands:
The makeactive means just that, make active the current (WinXP in our
case) boot partition.  The rootnoverify tells Grub to not try to read
the M$Windoze proprietary boot code (it can't).  The map command
virtually swaps drives so that WinXP boot loader does not go spastic if
it finds itself on any other drive than /dev/hda and so overcomes the
WinXP inability to boot from any other than the first drive.  Finally
there's the hide/unhide command which will allow multiple M$Windoze OS'
to coexist independently without blending their partition bootloading
files into a mess (the intended M$Windoze multibooting approach).

> > Is it possible to safely shrink an ext3 partition on the 
> current drive
> > 0 to make way for this?
> 
> You can resize an unmounted partition by running resize2fs to 
> shrink the
> filesystem, then delete the partition in cfdisk and recreate 
> it slightly
> larger than the new filesystem size and then running 
> resize2fs again. Or
> you could just boot from a Knoppix CD and run qtparted.
> 
> > The only other thought that comes to mind at this point, assuming I
> > haven't missed something obvious, is to rearrange the drives in the
> > box and make drive 1 into drive 0. If I then installed grub on the
> > Windows drive and fixed up fstab and the contents of grub.conf to
> > recognize Gentoo on drive 1, would it work?
> 
> This certainly seems the best solution. It saves Windows getting arsey
> about drives or having to try to fool it with GRUB map commands. I'd
> disconnect the Gentoo drive and install Windows, then replace 
> the Gentoo
> drive as slave, boot from a live CD, edit fstab and run grub. windows
> should then remain blissfully unaware of your Gentoo 
> installation, which
> means it won't try to "fix" it for you at some random later date.

I doubt that this is necessary.  Either try it with only one drive
connected to the machine as suggest previously, or perhaps try this:

Create your own NTFS partition and mark it as the only active boot
partition on the drive you want it installed, using fdisk or whatever.
Then use the hide command to hide all other OS from the grub menu.  Then
try to install WinXP to see if it will get on with the job.   I am not
sure that this method will work without any problems, because I haven't
tried it out myself.  I suspect that it may still fall over itself when
it detects that the proposed partition is not a primary partition on the
first drive.  Truth is that by the time you changed your grub.conf to
include the hide command, then re-installed Grub, remodified the
grub.conf, etc. you might as well physically swap the drives and
complete the WinXP installation as B Gates intended.

I must reiterate here that every time you change the physical order of
your drives you should reset your BIOS.  This is a good idea even the
BIOS is supposed to do this automatically.  Also, when you finish
installing and before you reboot with Grub may be worth checking that
the grub.map file shows the correct mapping sequence of your devices.
-- 
Regards,
Mick

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