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Got my Ubuntu disk,got two hard drives,can i dual boot off of a seperate drive?

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tinyvillager:

 Ok,my machine has two hard drives,one drive has Windows XP Pro and the other has nothing (or will have Ubuntu)

 Is it possible to boot from the second drive ?

Complete newbie to linux,and this is my primary machine so i don't want to bork it.

Any input is appreciated.

Gothi[c]:
it's possible.
there are however quite a number of ways to do it.

I'm not sure if the ubuntu installer will build your grub boot menu correctly by default or install grub in the correct harddrive's mbr, so it may or may not require some hacking around.

If your system just starts up to XP with no boot menu after the ubuntu install, boot from the live cd, and mount your ubuntu partition, and edit /boot/grub/menu.lst

JennyB:

 Ok,my machine has two hard drives,one drive has Windows XP Pro and the other has nothing (or will have Ubuntu)

 Is it possible to boot from the second drive ?

Complete newbie to linux,and this is my primary machine so i don't want to bork it.

Any input is appreciated.
-tinyvillager (March 14, 2007, 12:12 AM)
--- End quote ---

I got caught doing this on a similar system. Ubuntu installed OK (the process is actually very easy) but grub went on the XP disk and that refused to boot. That is, XP showed as anoption on the GRUB boot menu, but selecting it laoded nothing. I had to reinstall XP, which was by no means so easy  :mad:

My advice: disconnect the XP disc and install Ubuntu standalone on the other one. Then reconnect the XP disc and use the BIOS to select which to boot from.

jgpaiva:
I have been using xp and ubuntu for a few years now, and it works great.
Current version of ubuntu automatically installs and configures grub for windows and ubuntu. (notice that you need to have both disks connected during install).
The only problem i've found is that sometimes ubuntu (magically) changes the grub.conf file which makes grub's configuration go away. I would definitelly recomend you to backup that file.

f0dder:
If you remove the XP disk while installing (but leave the ubuntu in the position (pri/sec, master/slave) it will have when the XP disk is re-attached!), the boot manager goes on the ubuntu disk, and you can then use your BIOS boot menu (usually F8) to choose the right disk when booting. At least that's safe++ and ought to work :)

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