Partition and installation

This is my situation.

I have one hard drive which is the one which came with my laptop and I have windows 7 running on it.

I got another hard drive and put it as an ultra bay on my laptop. Now I just want to install on the second hard drive [ultra bay one] with out touching the laptop hard drive.

When I installed Open suse on the ultra bay hard drive, it put the GRUB loader on both the hard drive.

So my question is, how can I install Open Suse on the ultra bay hard drive without touching anything on the windows 7 hard drive and not dealing with the GRUB loader. I want it like, if ever i want the open suse, i can just boot via the ultra bay hard drive.

Thanks.

Just install GRUB to the second hdd only. You need to set the option during install (at the install summary point, select Boot section and amend)

I have that setup on an ultrabay drive I use across a couple of machines; if the drive is in the machine & I want to use one of the OSs on it, just do F12 at boot (assume it’s a TP if it’s an ultrabay),pick the second drive and its GRUB menu appears; otherwise by default the first hdd boots whether the ultrabay drive is there or not.

Alternatively you could pull the primary hdd during install so it wouldn’t even be seen as an option, but that might confuse BIOS boot order?

And if you’ve already had grub install on the first hdd, you’ll need to run whatever Win7’s equivalent of fixmbr is to get that back to defaulting to Win7.

IG

Thanks man. I will try the amend. I just was going to take the hard drive out and install it. But apparently the ultrabad hard drive is dead. So will wait for another Hard drive and then try. Thanks again.

I’ll post the exact config instructions when I get back to my laptops tonight…unless anyone “more cleverer than what I am” :wink: gets here first.

If the hdd is broken (that’s why it’s “ultrabad” ?), doesn’t sound like you’re in too much of a hurry anyway !

IG

It was a typo, i meant ultrabay… lol…

Ya. I am going to contact the manf. to sent me a replacement as its under warranty.

I am loving the open suse (running it via the USB occasionally).

But the partitioning ain’t that great. For partitioning, I kind off prefer Ubuntu. as it did what I wanted to partition and not mess my mbr on windows. lol… it took me 3hrs to fix that on my windows 7 partition. lol…

Interesting ! I actually found Ubu (9.10 and my first experience with that distro) a real pain to set up how I wanted (rather than how it wanted), especially the partitioning and grub, yet Suse I find much easier. Then again I’ve been using Suse since 8.something so there is some familiarity there - guess it’s just what you’re used to.

Re the hardware, curious to know what hdd has failed, especially one still in warranty?

IG

It was a Hitachi 250gb sata 2.5inch hard drive . It just doesn’t power on. Bought it this september.

Re ubuntu. I am using ubuntu since 2007. i liked it at that time. But now, open suse has got very great driver support for display and wireless. It just looks really clean compared to ubuntu 9.10. I would say try try ubuntu 9.04. although the istallation is still the same. I dont like 9.10. its driver support for display has gone down.

s-sober
this is what I did (& it works - not saying it’s the “right” way !!):

at install when you get to the install summary, select the Boot section;
go to bootloader installation details and change the disk order so your secondary disk is top of the pile;
back to the bootloader location and select only mbr for grub installation location (i.e. no other option boxes ticked)

This left the primary disk untouched (it happens to have a couple of other Linuxes as well as a couple of Win versions and uses a Suse grub to control).

So at startup, I let it default and I just get the boot options from the primary disk - would be true if that just had Windows on it; if however I interrupt startup and select the second disk as boot device I get a different grub menu with the options for that second disk - would be true if just one Linux were installed there.

Hope that makes sense. Good luck with the replacement disk.

IG