Odd dual boot question

[matt832]

Did a quick search didn't find anything so I'm asking. Just setup SuSe. 9.3 on my Gigabyte GA-7VRXP motherboard. This has on board RAID which I use. I have my WIn Xp on the raid drives and I added a seperate HD for my Linux install. I can set BIOS to boot from one or the other and I have it set to boot from the Linux HD and just unplug it when I want to go to Windows. Not a good long term solution.

the Linux install is identified as hde and the raid is on hda and hdb. Linux reports this as a software raid, which I don't' think it is since it's on board to the MB and it warns me about potential problems. Can you point me to some link to help or an idea what kind of command line I need to identify my Win XP install on the boot screen with Linux?

[saikee]

If you tell the BIOS to boot the Linux disk then the MBR position is with the Linux disk and your RAID will not be touched. Suse's boot loader should have been installed there.

Like you said you can always reverse the booting sequence so that you can boot Winodws without the Linux. No need to do any plugging and unplugging.

Under the normal circumstance Suse will dual boot your Windows but if Suse doesn't recognise your RAID it may treat it as two separate disks. My guess is that you are using RAID 0 to get performance instead of security in RAID 1.

Suse uses Grub but allow the user to choose Lilo. Assuming it is Grub the boot menu is a text file /boot/grub/menu.lst which you can open with Kwrite to carry out editing if you log in as root. The hdd naming convention is store in /boot/grub/device.map

You can try to add these 3 lines to /boot/grub/menu.lst to see if Suse' Grub responds to it on boot up

title here is my Windows in RAID of hda & hdb
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
makeactive
chainloader +1

Let us know if you have picked Lilo as the boot loader.

I suggest you make a Grub bootable floppy which can be used to boot all the systems I know in the PC. It is one of the best tool. I am sure you will be impressed with it.

While in Suse and log in as root, pop a floppy disk into the drive, change directory to /boot/grub and write the stage1 and stage2 files out as follow

cd /boot/grub
dd if=stage of=/dev/fd0 bs=512 count=1
dd if=stage2 of=/dev/fd0 bs=512 seek=1

This floppy will boot you into Grub prompt which you can then boot every system manually by typing

root (i,j)
chainloader +1
boot

where i=disk No. and j= partition No. bearing in mind Grub counts from 0 and not 1!

To choose the partition to boot just type

geometry (hd0) for the first disk and

geometry (hd1) for the second disk and so on.

You identify XP by its NTFS partition type No=7 (or 0x07) and Linux partition No=83.

Good luck