I have a two hard drive system with Windows on drive 0 and suse 11.3 on drive 1. Now the question is I have the grub loaded on Drive 0, should I move the grub loaded from the MBR on Drive 0 to Drive 1 in case the Windows drive loader or drive 0 Fails?
I am thinking that if I move the grub loader to Drive 1, then I will be able to boot the second hard drive with Suse 11.3. Am I thinking properly?
I wouldn’t worryabout it
If it’s working - leave it
Drive failure: Never happened to me yet
If you re-install windows at some time, then you will need to re-install grub
Re-Install Grub Quickly with Parted Magic
In order to have grub on your SUSE hd you ought to have made it hd0, that is you should have set it as the first hd in BIOS before installing SUSE.
Typically, I would install windows. Change the hd boot order and install SUSE, making sure it was seeing the windows hd as hd1. Install grub to hd0 (SUSE) and manually write a boot entry for windows in the menu.lst
You might be interested in reading this post - among others - where jdmcdaniel3 describes his method:
Looking for Grub and Windows bootloader in all partitions.
Very good information, thank you. Very good options.
I like this solution, I just wished I had known this before starting my Windows 7 and Suse 11.3 installs to the separate hard drives, but this solution makes sense to me. Thank You, Caf4926
cherock1254, loading openSUSE on a second hard drive is a very good solution. I will say that caf4926 has a point in that fixing a working system may not be a good idea without a lot of research first to make sure you know what you want to do. If you want to list specifics about your setup, such as running fdisk -l, a copy of your grub menu.lst file and even a copy of the output from findgrub. I would love to look at it.
Since I have no way of knowing your actual user level, such changes to your system might best be made the next time you decide to upgrade openSUSE, like when version 11.4 comes out next year or if you should buy a new hard drive. Then we could get serious on the subject.
Thank You,
My question is what happens if you did that and drive 1 fails?
Backup key data, configuration and hidden files on a regular basis and if necessary frequently.
I tend to skip backups of Windows files and applications that I can re-install from CD/DVD or from the Internet.
Short answer: works both ways, but system will boot according to the device defined on the BIOS.
Short answer: works both ways, but system will boot according to the device defined on the BIOS.
ketheriel, you are very right. It is the best of both worlds in that both drives are bootable, the Windows drive is unmodified and your BIOS determines what to boot. If your second drive is removed for any reason, your first drive boots as it did before you had openSUSE installed.
The downside of this setup is the preparation needed to make openSUSE install this way, which is not its default. You often need to make manual choices on how to partition the second drive and you always have to make changes to the Installation of the Grub boot loader’s setup. If you don’t have a real step-by-step guide, you need to understand hard drive partitions and just what the grub boot loader options are. And don’t forget to backup that first drive just in case something goes wrong.
Thank You,