I have two separate hard drives. XP is already installed on one, and Open Suse 11 is already installed on the other drive. How do I get grub to let me choose which hard drive to boot from? I don’t want to have to keep going into BIOS. Re-installing Suse 11 is not an option at this point. I could re-install XP if I had to.
You have to have the grub menu written to the XP MBR. You can search here for many threads on grub and multiboot.
But, an excellent resource is Swerdna’a page.
You may be able to skip to step 2.
Hi,
There are several ways to deal with such a booting problem. Here are two of them:
-
Get a copy of the mbr of the second disk (the one where you have installed open suse 11), store it in the windows xp root directory, (usually c ) and, finally, edit the windows bootloader configuration file so that it includes a stanza to your open suse system.
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From within open 11, edit your /boot/grub/menu.lst so that it includes a new stanza pointing (chainloading) to the windows xp
bootloader.
Those are high level description, I know, but you now have something to investigate.
This forum has lots of references to the same issue.
Hope this helps.
Regards.
Your post suggests you have the drives set up to boot independently of one another, that is, neither boot loader is chainloading to the other.
As ref’d above already, the usual method is to boot from the linux drive and include in grub’s menu.lst a chainloading boot stanza that calls XP’s ntldr; it must include the grub “map” command to fool W$ into thinking it is booting from the first drive. @swerdna’s tutuorial details how to do this as does the grub manual; it’s simple.
The method of chainloading from ntldr by putting a copy of the linux partition boot sector in ntldr’s root directory with an entry in boot.ini, IME does not work across disks.
Grub is much, much more flexible that ntldr; the best route is to use it to chainload boot XP. That you already have the booting working on the 2nd drive makes this approach all the more preferable.