General :: Triple Boot Impossible On Two Hard Drives?
Apr 13, 2011
I'm not exactly a newbie to Linux and it's OS, I have been using Ubuntu since the 8.xx release. I have two hard drives in my system, Hard Drive #1 is the primary drive and is 250GB, this hard drive is only used for Windows 7 Pro 64bit. The second hard drive is 320GB and split into two partitions. The first half has Windows XP Pro on it and the second partition has Ubuntu 10.04 on it. Both are split evenly at 160GB each. Here's how I did it, I first started by loading Windows XP Pro onto second hard drive, using the entire drive, once all updates and settings were applied I then installed Windows 7 Pro 64bit onto the first hard drive and used it fully. Once all settings and updates were applied I restarted the computer and it loaded directly into Win7, which is to be expected. I opened my computer, browsed through the second drive to make sure all files were intact.
I then downloaded and created a USB installation drive for Ubuntu 10.04. After the creation of the USB drive I proceeded to install Ubuntu 10.04 on my second drive, using half the space for Windows XP Pro, and half the space for Ubuntu 10.04. After that was all setup and done, I restarted one last time. Low and behold Ubuntu 10.04 and Windows 7 both appear on the boot menu, however Windows XP Pro does not. I panicked for a few short seconds but after logging into Windows 7 I realized all my XP Pro files where safe. So now I have 2 hard drives with 3 operating systems. Hard drive one has Windows 7 only and hard drive 2 is split between XP Pro and Ubuntu. However I cannot get Windows XP Pro added to the boot menu no matter how hard I try. I'm not entirely confident using the terminal as I am just starting to learn programming, but I know how to enter the commands and get things moving.
Every website that I look at tells me I need to start by editing some grub/menu.lsd, which for some reason does not exist or is "invalid directory". Some websites say I need to run "sudo apt-get grub-update", which again is an invalid command. Here's what I need. A step by step tutorial on how to add my XP into the loading menu. Example of step by step includes "Step 1: Open Terminal" and etc... It needs to be basic and down to earth. Don't just tell me to run codes and type a bunch of junk because that doesn't seem to work for me. I do not know what (hd,0) or (hd,1) means, but assuming the websites are correct, (hd,0) would be my Windows 7 HD and (hd,1) would be my Windows XP/Ubuntu HD?
I have an HP Elitebook 8540w with 500gb hdd running win7.I plan to replace my blue-ray drive with an ssd using a hhd caddy. The problem is that i want to keep my first hdd (win7) as it is, and install on the new ssd 2 operating systems:win10 and debian 8.
I have a dual boot with vista on disk 0 and ubuntu on disk1. I just installed a disk 2 that I would like to use to try out other distros. Ubuntu is the only linux experience I have had. I'm really not very good at all of this, so my questions before I start loading another distro are:
1. Does Fedora use GRUB as its installer? 2. When I installed ubuntu on disk 1 (sdb1), the install was very simple. I chose sdb1 for the install, it loaded it, and when it was done I simply had the choice of which drive to boot into. Will installing Fedora on disk 2 (sdc1) be just as simple, or will I encounter steps I must take to make it so that I have a choice of which disk/OS to boot into?
I now have a triple boot on triple drives with Vista on sda, Ubuntu on sdb, and PCLinuxOS on sdc.When I installed PCLinuxOS on sdc, I installed the bootloader in the first sector of partition 1 of sdc so that I could keep using the Grub bootloader that installed with Ubuntu.Everything is working fine at the moment.I now want install Fedora 10 on sdc for experimentation. I have used gparted to create another partition on sdc to install Fedora 10, so my question is 'What and where exactly should I put in the /boot/grub/menu.lst of my original bootloader to get to Fedora?'
I just started working with Linux over the weekend. I do have a working dual booting system but it's not configured exactly how I want it to be. Currently Windows 7 Ultimate and Ubuntu are on the same hard drive but different partitions. The Windows boot screen comes up and I can select Windows or Ubuntu fine. Grub comes up when I select Ubuntu and I can successfully select any choice in the menu and it will run properly.
Everything works great now so you may wonder why I even want to keep tinkering, well, it's not working how I want it to. This is what I want it to do. I want Windows 7 on disk 0 and Ubuntu on disk 1. I want each OS to have it's own hard drive. I want Grub to be the only boot loader that comes up with the option to select Ubuntu or Windows. I want to skip the window's OS selection screen all together. I can modify Grub, I've already done some of that on my work computer.
I've been installing from windows. Should I use a CD instead? Would that accomplish my goals without doing anything special?
I have a SATA drive that worked fine. Then I installed two more hard drives into my system. When these hard drives are installed, if I try to access the SATA drive in Linux, it will start lightly clicking and then the drive will become unavailable. If I power on the machine without the other two hard drives then it works fine. What could be causing this to happen? I don't think it's heat because the two hard drives are far away from the SATA drive.
I have ubuntu 11.04 installed on a 80gb hard drive and everything was running fine. I then installed a second drive (1gb) for storage. It worked fine after a reboot but now it won't boot. I'm pretty sure it's just confused as to which drive is the boot drive. I'm not sure as to how to fix it in GRUB2.
One hard drive (I'll call it hard drive 1 for the sake of this post) has windows xp and ubuntu on it. It dual boots fine and Grub is installed in the MBR. I physically removed that hard drive and installed a higher capacity hard drive (I'll call it hard drive 2). This hard drive (hard drive 2) is a dual boot (win xp and linux mint) and Grub is installed in the MBR. It works fine.
Here's what I want to do:
1. Make hard drive 1 the master drive, and hard drive 2 the slave drive. I know how to do this (hd pin settings, master drive on the end of the ide chain, etc).
2. Have a grub menu that allows me to boot any of the OS's from any of the hard drives. As such this grub menu should have 4 entries.
What I think I need to do is add two entries to hard drive one's Grub; 1 for window xp (on the slave drive) and one for linux mint (also on the slave drive). How do I do that? However, I wonder if there is a way to tell hard drive 1's grub to link to the grub on hard drive two - i.e. to make an entry show up that when selected would show hard drive 2's grub menu options. Is this possible?
Somehow after recent system update I'm unable to find any drives in the system. I see all of them in Bios, Grub finds them as well, but while loading the kernel and booting system to console they are missing. fdisk -l shows nothing (but somehow it did show me 1 drive for 5 minutes and then it was lost as well) I suspect that it was caused by udev and hal update, but I did etc-update and recompiled the kernel to a newer version (but with the old config) and it didn't work. I'm able to boot in the system and somehow work in it, although on the boot stage I get errors like /dev/sda1 is missing.
last night i install ubuntu on my pc while installin there was a windows reporting a grub installing error it saids " grub cant be installed here" and it gives me the choice to select where to install it,the problem is that i have 2 HD one of 80GB and the other is 160GB in the 80 gb HD i have windows xp already isntalled and in the 160 GB HD i was installing ubuntu, i choose to install the grub in the 160 GB HD and now when i turn on my pc i can only access ubuntu is like if my HD with Win xp just disappear
this may be a very stupid question, but. My computer has two hard drives. One has Windows XP installed on it. The other is blank.
Is it possible for me to install Ubuntu onto the second hard drive, and run a dual-boot using GRUB during startup? Or does it only work when both OSs are on the same hard drive?
I would like to install Ubuntu 10.04 on my new 1 TB hard drive. I currently have Windows XP installed on a 160 GB hard drive for things that I cannot do on Ubuntu. I would like to know if it's possible to install the other hard drive, and then dual boot Windows with it? Effectively dual booting across two hard drives. I wouldn't care if GRUB replaces the standard Windows bootloader, just as long as I can choose between the two at startup
I have windows7 on sda1.I have ubuntu natty on sdb1 I just purchased 2 more sata hard drives I have 2 sata burners how do I get my 2 new hard drives to work I plugged them in but no boot screen I have six sata slots
is it possible to change the boot order of hard drives? I`ve got two 250gb sata hard drives on my pc and i can`t figure how to change the boot order without physically switching the data cables inside the case.I`ve been into the bios and it won`t let me switch the order there. In one of harddrive I've installed UBUNTU 8.0.4 and other having UBUNTU 10.4. I am assuming I need to change grub/menu.lst file, but I am not sure exact syntex.
I have 3 hard drives: one with vista installed on it working fine, one with 10.04 installed on it and working fine and the last is just a media storage drive. Currently I have been unplugging the windows or ubuntu drive depending on which OS I want to boot. What do I need to do so that I don't have to physically disconnect the drives and can just pick which OS to boot on power up?
I just upgraded to 10.04 and it went very smoothly. Only problem is that this version now tries to check a couple of hard drives that are external and not attached to the system. They were set up some time ago and the boot will not proceed unless I manually enter "S" to skip. I have removed folders for these disks that were in /media/... but that didn't solve the problem.
I need a suggestion on setting up a dual boot menu for my setup. I have two hard drives one with WinXP and a second one with CentOS 5.3 installed. I basically moved the hard drive from another identical machine to this one and so I want to setup a boot menu to access either windows or Linux. CentOS already has grub on it.
What is the simplest method of setting up the dual boot menu? I would like something which is easy to administer which I can just ghost over either the Linux drive or Windows drive or disconnect either and have either boot just fine. I don't ask for much do I?
If I have to go through a little process after ghosting over one or the other drives that would probably be ok. We get updated images for this machine and replace the image on the drives with new images, although Linux shouldn't be reimaged, just windows. So the Linux drive (2nd drive) should not be touched normally.
Ok so first off my hardware Asrock 775dual-vsta Master and Slave hard drives on primary IDE Absolute Linux 2.6.33.3 ; Dos 7.1 (yes Dos 7.1 by itself no windows whatsoever) Absolute Linux=sda1 ; Dos=sdb1
Ok so I can't boot into dos from lilo boot menu. It boots fine however if I tell the bios to boot from the second HDD first (DOS). But it's inconvenient to tell the bios every time on power-up to choose the second hard drive as the first boot device. Here is my lilo.conf boot section
Either way when I boot from the first hard drive (linux hard drive) and lilo pops up, I select dos and hit enter then nothing... It just sits there and ctrl-alt-delete can't reboot my comp as it's frozen.
I don't wanna have to tell the bios to select my dos hard drive as my primary boot device everytime I wanna boot dos. I wan't my linux hard drive to be my primary boot device and have my dos hard drive selectable from the lilo boot menu. Why can't I do that? What am I doing wrong? I thought this was easier than dual booting from a single hard drive?
After I complete a big project I'm working on I'm going to be wiping and re-doing my desktop machine, probably in the next day or three. I'm going to be setting up a dual-boot; my first in about three years. I'll be using separate hard disks for this, and installing Slackware second on the bigger of the two drives. When I've done this in the past I've used Grub; Is there anything I need to know or pitfalls I need to avoid doing it with Lilo?
I have a Centos 5.5 system with 2* 250 gig sata physical drives, sda and sdb. Each drive has a linux raid boot partition and a Linux raid LVM partition. Both pairs of partitions are set up with raid 1 mirroring. I want to add more data capacity - and I propose to add a second pair of physical drives - this time 1.5 terabyte drives presumably sdc and sdd. I assume I can just plug in the new hardware - reboot the system and set up the new partitions, raid arrays and LVMs on the live system. My first question:
1) Is there any danger - that adding these drives to arbitrary sata ports on the motherboard will cause the re-enumeration of the "sdx" series in such a way that the system will get confused about where to find the existing raid components and/or the boot or root file-systems? If anyone can point me to a tutorial on how the enumeration of the "sdx" sequence works and how the system finds the raid arrays and root file-system at boot time
2) I intend to use the majority of the new raid array as an LVM "Data Volume" to isolate "data" from "system" files for backup and maintenance purposes. Is there any merit in creating "alternate" boot partitions and "alternate" root file-systems on the new drives so that the system can be backed up there periodically? The intent here is to boot from the newer partition in the event of a corruption or other failure of the current boot or root file-system. If this is a good idea - how would the system know where to find the root file-system if the original one gets corrupted. i.e. At boot time - how does the system know what root file-system to use and where to find it?
3) If I create new LVM /raid partitions on the new drives - should the new LVM be part of the same "volgroup" - or would it be better to make it a separate "volgroup"? What are the issues to consider in making that decision?
We were trying to install w7 on a reserved partition. W7 did not like the partition (whatever we tried).
Since we had 3 hard-drives, on the allocated drive we deleted all partitions and set the partition table type new to MSDOS (yast etc.....).
W7 installed fine. We did not time it, but it appeared that 11.3 installs faster plus considering 11.3 installs quite a number of applications.
There are plenty of postings re integrating W7 to the Grub-menu.
This system went through several Suse updates, hardware upgrades, basically was all over the place.... we did a "new" install of 11.3 allocating its own hard-drive.
Install......fine, and Grub entered W7 to the menu. Worked ! Mounted the windows partition to /home/yourusername/windows
So, if you really (?) need W7 and have a spare hard-drive, this maybe is a clean solution.
I'm a n00b at dual booting and I plan on installing Ubuntu 10.04 on a separate hard drive than my Windows 7 64 bit one in a dual boot situation. I have read that you can do this by unplugging the Windows hard drive, install Ubuntu on the other one, and than plug the Windows hard drive back in and everything will be fine and dandy. Is this correct? If it is, will I have to manually set the Primary and Secondary drive (in the BIOS I think?), or will it automatically do that.
I've been trying to properly install grub for the past 3 days and failing every time.I recently bought a new computer and would like to dual boot Windows 7 64 and Natty. On my previous machines, ubuntu installer has automatically detected windows. It does not do so on this machine.I have three hard drives: 2 ssd's and a single 3 tb drive for storage.
I would like one ssd for windows 7 and one for natty.Currently, I am able to boot into both OS's but only by altering the boot sequence of the drives from the bios. I am hesitant to install grub to the windows drive for fear I will lose the ability to boot into windows. I did this early in the discovery process and ended up having to reinstall windows.
i'm tying to dual boot Vista64 (already installed) and Fedora 10 x86_64. I am running a Dell XPS 410 running 2 sata hard drives raid 0 (ICH8DH). I started the process by shrinking my C drive on disk0 leaving 64.45GB of unallocated space. Next I rebooted into Fedora install DVD and when i get to blue graphical install screen i get message asking if my drive is GPT and if it is it may be corrupted. I click NO, and it comes up with a message telling me i have to initialize my drive if i want to use it ( have to click NO twice) and if i do it i will lose all my data.
i can click no and keep proceding through the install until i get to the partition setup screen. No hard drives or partitions are shown. I've tried googling the problem and get bits of pieces of information scattered in different parts but nothing conclusive to my problem i think. As far as my background of knowledge goes, I'm new to the linux community but give me a thorough guide and i'll do fine (i hope). I've been using fedora on a separate laptop for 2 days now .
I need to find the best way to triple boot XP Win7 and Debian, with Debian installed first on my laptop. VMWare, Wine and Cedega cant do what I need with how I run my laptop, which is equivalent to my portable laptop/workstation. Is there a partitioning tool in Debian that I can install to make a small partition for each? I also hace to set up GRUB instead of the Windows BL.
I'm a newb and have ambitions for a triple boot with MAC/W2K/#! 9.04. I first installed Ubuntu on C600 laptop and then switched to Crunchbang 9.04 since the Dell is lacking any ooomph. Now I'm trying to triple boot an HP Pavilion a330n (AMD Athlon, non-SATA board which has created problems getting Leopard to play nice, but that's another story). I removed the HD from the C600 (W2K) and replaced it with another running only #!. I installed the W2K laptop drive as master on the HP desktop with a 120GB IDE drive as slave. The 120GB drive has been partitioned for 4: MAC (35GB, ext3), W2K (35GB, NTFS), #! (40GB, ext3) and Linux-Swap (remainder, ext3).
Now to the question: I was planning on using the DD command to "xcopy" the W2K drive to the W2K partition. Sounds simple. I am trying to use the following: dd if=/dev/sda2 of=/dev/sdb3 bs=4096 conv=notrunc,noerror
To back up a step, I saw somewhere else suggesting to boot live and run off the CD to facilitate this since I'm manipulating both hard drives. Since I'm working live, I've had some trouble sorting out password issues with root. I managed to change the root password (I know - dangerous, but only for this session anyway). Each time I try to execute the dd command, I get nada. No activity. The cursor drops below the root@crunchband:~$ prompt and just blinks. There is no important information to be lost on either drive per se, but have lost the W2K install CD long ago which is why I need to use DD anyway.
trying to triple boot XP, Ubuntu, RHEL 5.4but unable to bring every thing in boot loader.* It loads XP with Ubuntu successfully or XP with RHEL 5.4 but not all the three.* when I install XP followed by Ubuntu then RHEL, I am not having a primary partition to install RHEL. It stops there.* I tried to copy the kernel path of ubuntu from grub.cfg in ubuntu and tried to edit in grub.conf file of rhel and added an entry but it displays in boot loader [start screen where it displays all OS listed] but unable to boot ubuntu [unable to load ubuntu kernel].Current situation reformat all Linux partitions and installed Ubuntu with below partition. installed successful. But rhel not installed due to error.Partition table:
/dev/hda1 > XP [primary patition][can boot and work] /dev/hda2 > Ubuntu [primary patition][can boot and work] /dev/hda5 > swap for ubuntu [secondary partition]
