Quote:
Originally posted by Peryn
i found the easiest way for me to deal with it was to get one of those removable hard drive cases. Install Linux to it and set it as the primary boot device. Install Windows to the other drive as a secondary boot device. Now all you have to do, is turn the key on the Linux drive, and it will boot into Linux. Turn it off, and you boot into Windows. Dont hafta worry about one system depending on another to be able to select it to boot, no fancy bios stuff, and you dont have to keep selecting which OS to boot into every time it starts up.
Something like this
All you hafta do is turn the key on the right.
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Interesting.
Quote:
Originally posted by bacon_masta
if i install windows xp pro on a 40 gig hard drive, and a flavor of linux (mandrake, redhat, or suse at this point) on a seperate 20 gig hard drive, to designate which os i want to boot i'll just have to set bios to boot to the primary or the secondary drive, right?
feel dumb for asking, but never tried this kind of dual boot
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First off, I wouldn't suggest Fedora Core 2 for a dual-boot situation. I would definitely use latest Mandrake or SuSE. Fedora Core 2 has a *very* nasty bug in it that can stop dual booting from working.
That said, you should be able to pop in the distro's boot cd, do the install, and it'll likely handle the dual-boot stuff. Every distro comes with a boot loader/manager (i.e. Lilo or Grub). When your computer boots up, it firsts goes to them.. and they'll prompt you with a menu of your OS's, so you can choose what to boot into. No BIOS changes needed.
That said... I'd suggest having WinXP as your primary drive, and put Linux on a secondary. Linux can handle being installed on a secondary drive. WinXP can't (it will overwrite your boot loader w/ it's own.. causing headaches). When I had a linux drive already, and wanted to put WinXP on my second drive.. I had to take out the Linux drive, make the WinXP drive the primary drive, install on that.. and then restore my setup w/ my Linux drive the primary drive.
After that, it was a bit of a challenge getting WinXP to boot (but at least I could boot into Linux to play w/ my Grub configuration). Using grub, I was able to swap the hard drive order (virtually), fooling windows into thinking it was still the primary drive, and booting into it without problems. Still, lots of googling and frustration to get me to that point.