[CLUE-Tech] Dual boot setup

[Nate Duehr]

Jed S. Baer wrote:

>On Thu, 27 May 2004 20:35:08 -0600
>Jeff Cann <j.cann at isuma.org> wrote:
>
>  
>
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>>It's been about 7 years since I setup a dual-boot linux / windows
>>machine.
>>
>>Which OS should I install first?  IIRC, it used to be windows because of
>>the stupid master boot record or, maybe linux first?
>>    
>>
>
>Jeff, you've probably already seen this. I mention it because IIRC, you're
>a RedHat user, and thus I consider that you might be using Fedora in this
>case. So this looks to be of interest.
>
>http://lwn.net/Articles/86835/
>
>jed
>  
>
I've run into this with other distros before too.  Highly annoying.

(A recent installation of GRUB into the MBR and Fedora Core 2 on the one 
box that has WinXP on it at home caused XP not to boot  at all from 
GRUB, while Linux was still bootable.  5 minutes with an XP installation 
CD to put the XP MBR back and XP was happy again, but now I need to 
figure it out and put GRUB back...)

This type of goofiness is why I went to using the $15 slide out drive 
trays and smaller disks instead of messing with multi-booting.  When 
dual/triple/whatever-booting works, it works great.  When it gets hosed 
up by old BIOS'es and strange drive geometries, it's easier just to 
power off the machine, swap hard disks and power back up.  My opinion 
anyway... and sure saves a lot of time wasted messing around with the 
boot stuff so you can actually get back to doing whatever it was you 
were really doing.  (GRIN)

I also made a mess of my "play" box once by trying to dual boot Linux 
and XP, Linux from the SCSI disks and XP from the IDE ones... GRUB was 
not super happy with the idea, for some reason.  (Heh...)

In both cases, most of the time I describe these weird things like this, 
the stories are from my "mess around" box, so if it starts to eat too 
much time (my life) I just try other things... the drive trays and a few 
hard disks of different sizes laying around in them work wonders for 
productivity when researching new OS versions, etc...

Nate Duehr, nate at natetech.com