USB Grub to IDE WinXP

[n4pgw]

In order to install 11.0 on my USB drive, I had to disable my IDE drive as I did not find the place to change hdds within the install. My Dell computer either defaults to booting from the USB or the USB boot is not an option at all.

I have an IDE C drive with WinXP which boots normally when the usb is not connected, otherwise I have to hit the F-12 and choose the drive to boot from.

Grub on the USB only offers to boot OpenSUSE but I would like to add a default option to boot to winXP.

My drive partitions are:
IDE Internal
0-1 FAT - Dell recovery
0-2 NTFS - Windows boot and data

USB External
1-1 20 GB Linux /
1-2 343.71 GB Linux /home
1-3 100 GB NTFS (Windows/Linux common access area)
1-4 2 GB Linux Swap

FYI - Method to my madness
I hope to move the usb drive to different computers as desired and therefore have a common NTFS partition on which to share files from windows and linux. (however, I was unable to write to the partition from linux on a preliminary test.)
My swap partition is at the end to provided the fastest operation according to an article I read about linux. The larger root or boot partition is so I don't have to expand it later.

This system will primarily be a workstation but I am hoping to set it up to share the common ntfs partition, though I may have to convert it to something linux can write to.

I have two 500 GB USB drives a WD and a Seagate. The WD is primarily an NTFS data drive and the Seagate has the OpenSUSE I am working on. When all drives are plugged in, OpenSUSE tries to install only on the IDE. WHen it is disconnected, it tries to install on the WD. So to install to the Seagate, I had to disconnect the other two drives. When all are connected and the BIOS allows booting from the USB device, the choice always defaults to the Seagate. I can bypass this by hitting F-12 in the BIOS Boot but I would prefer to setup the USB GRUB to default to Windows and give me an option to boot to linux. Later I hope to move the WD drive to a dedicated Linux server to share across the network.

Thank you,
Buck

[Confuseling]

Linux can write to NTFS disks - that's a good choice for a shared partition, though possibly ext3 would be good too as Windows can read it, and it understands permissions, where NTFS doesn't. Not sure about that one...

You will be hard pressed to get the system on the drive to boot on multiple different systems - it isn't impossible, but it isn't easy (I don't think - I've never tried). But you can certainly use it to transfer data.

That said, if you want it to boot windows from grub, it should be pretty straightforward. Open openSUSE, open a root terminal, and type

fdisk -l
cat /boot/grub/menu.lst

Paste the output here.

[Axeia]

Linux can write to NTFS disks - that's a good choice for a shared partition, though possibly ext3 would be good too as Windows can read it, and it understands permissions, where NTFS doesn't. Not sure about that one...

Getting Linux to use NTFS is the better option imo, I have not been able to get ext3 running under Vista.., and I doubt the situation is any better under win7.