I have a perfectly running openSUSE 11.4 64-bit system. I would like to know if I install (yes can you believe it?) Microsoft WindowZ XP on a second hard drive on the same machine, would grub be able to detect the Windows installation when both hard drives are connected or is there a specific configuration that I need to do in the Yast’s Boot Loader Settings?
PS - I want to install WindowZ XP for my wife that still feels a little uncomfortable with Linux.
Grub doesn’t detect anything by itself but some scripts like updategrub do, and manually editing the Grub menu to add a Windows boot entry is rather simple. Another option would be to install Windows in a virtual machine. Once in full screen, nobody could tell that Linux is behind … and it would make it easy to switch slowly to Linux as you can use both OS in the same time (or even have a Windows application on the Linux desktop). Just an idea … Otherwise, installing Windows on another drive and booting it from GRUB is not a problem at all.
On 07/07/2011 01:36 PM, please try again wrote:
>
> installing Windows on another drive and booting it from GRUB
> is not a problem at all.
but, because everything Microsoft wants to be the only thing on the
machine when you boot after the XP install it will only boot to
XP…until you boot from the openSUSE install disk and repair grub to
point to both XP and openSUSE…
Probably not, because if people ask questions about GRUB, they probably know little about it. And if they know little about it, they probably install openSUSE with default settings - which AFAIK doesn’t install GRUB in MBR, and Windows doesn’t overwrite partition bootsectors so far. The worst which could happen is that it snaps the bootflag, but that won’t happen either if the OP installs Windows on another drive. So there is in fact no problem at all. Just wait for one of our “Windows of the second drive experts” (we have some) - who can tell you more about the best way to do it.