Here’s the situation… I’ve got two seperate drives, both with a full-blown operating system installed, both fully functional when plugged into the the appropriate IDE cable as "Drive C" or "hda" respectively.

Mandriva is using LILO… in the master boot record of it’s drive.

Adding Windows to the bootup options menu and pointing it to the Windows drive installed on a separate IDE cable, as hdc… does NOT work.

How to proceed at this point without completely destroying either installation. If I have to wipe and reinstall Windows, that’s acceptable. But re-installing Mandriva at this point is NOT an option… just way to much data and add-in software at this point… it would take me DAYS to recover.

I notice in the Mandriva Linux Control Center that you can specifiy a different "Boot Device". What would happen if I changed that to "/dev/hdc", let it save it’s data, then shut down and switch the drives around?
News… one round-about approach that works, though it’s not that convenient…

Currently the Mandriva drive is on the mainboard’s primary IDE cable… the Windows drive is on the secondary cable.

If I go into the BIOS and disable the primary IDE, Windows will boot and function normally. And I get the added benefit of knowing that Windows will in no way be able to mess with the MBR (Master Boot Record) on the Linux drive. Which is the whole reason I wanted Windows on it’s own drive to begin with, instead of just a partition.

It’s not the most convienient solution… ideally I’d still like a boot-up menu for Mandriva/Windows using LILO or Grub. But until then, at least tweaking the BIOS is better than having to go into the box and switch the cables around. {grin}

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Filed under: Mandrake

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