Installation :: Dual Boot Menu Setup 2 Hard Drives?
Jun 17, 2010
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.
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May 23, 2010
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?
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May 1, 2010
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?
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May 4, 2010
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
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Jun 4, 2010
I have the following PC set up:
Dell 8400 with 3 GB of RAM with 3 160 GB SATA drives:
The first one has Windows XP installed on it.
The second one has been newly formatted and Ubuntu 10.04 has just been installed on it (20 GB / and 6 GB swap) with grub being installed on the first partition and not the master boot record. The remainder will be for storage for Windows.
The third drive is simply storage for Windows.
At this point I am able to boot XP just fine, but I'm not able to boot Linux. I just getting a blinking cursor or the PC just reboots when I choose Linux. I believe I have set up my boot.ini properly using:
C:Bootsectc.lnx="Linux Ubuntu"
After running dd if=/dev/sdc1 of=bootsect.lnx bs=512 count=1 and putting that file in place.
For reference, I don't believe this is a Linux problem, as much as I am simply trying to guide the ntldr to be properly pointed to a place where it can boot Linux. When I go into the bios and disable the first and the third hard drives, grub pops right up and I'm able to boot Linux with no problem, so that piece is fine. I think it's just now trying to get the correct syntax so I can boot Linux without having to disable drives and reenable them.
For kicks I even tried these syntax types in boot.ini:
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)="Linux11"
(i.e. 2nd disk, 1st partition ...etc...)
I read many troubleshooting documents on dual booting and so forth but I just can't get this right. For reference, I stated the way XP views my Hard Drives in the intro, which seem to be a different order than Linux sees them, yet I believe I've tried all the combos of settings for this to work (yet clearly have not). I have attached the output of boot_info_script*.sh here: [URL]. Boot Info Script 0.55 dated February 15th, 2010 ..... Devices which don't seem to have a corresponding hard drive.
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Jun 21, 2010
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.
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May 29, 2011
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.
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Feb 9, 2009
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 .
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Jun 25, 2010
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
# Linux bootable partition config begins
image = /boot/bzImage
initrd = /boot/initrd.gz
root = /dev/sda1
[Code]...
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?
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Nov 23, 2010
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?
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Dec 16, 2010
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?
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Oct 7, 2010
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.
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Aug 5, 2011
I have searched for this but can not find it. I want to install debian 6.0 squeeze on to both of my hard drives and run each as a seperate instance of debian, and be able to choose at boot up which one I want to run. I have an HP with 2 500 gig hard drives, running windows vista currently, processor is an intell quad 2 core 6600, nothing else on the pc for programs and such at this time. I would also like to keep the windows if possible to run other programs at a later time.
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Apr 30, 2010
I'm trying to make a fresh install of Ubuntu 10.04 on my system. I have 9.10 correctly setup on what I see here as devsda2. devsda3 does contain /home. devsda1 is for Vista. They are on a 500Gb hard drive. I also have a second 500Gb hard drive, formerly on a raid 0 with the first one, but now independent (raid deactivated from bios). It is here know as /dev/sdb, and contains other 3 partitions. Raid 0 is not hardware, but is an intel fake raid.
I then have other 4 drives, causing me NO problem.
I start live mode of Ubuntu 10.04 with noraid option. When I try to setup Ubuntu, during the process, where it comes to manually select partitions, the two 500Gb hard drives disappears, such that I'm not able to install Ubuntu on what now is /dev/sda2
If I start live mode of Ubuntu without noraid option, I will see the two 500Gb hd as being part of a raid 0, such that I can't use them.
The other 4 hd normally appear in both cases.
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Jul 10, 2011
I am finding it hard to get 2 seperate hard drives to work each having different OS..... windows XP and Ubuntu 10.10. Making Ubuntu the master, it can recognise the drive but cannot boot from it. If XP is the master it does not recognise the Ubuntu drive at all.
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Aug 25, 2011
I have been messing around with the ubuntu family for some time now, and usually have no problem finding my answers. This one, however, is giving me some trouble. I have been using ubuntu on my laptop for some time now, and recently got a new 2TB hard drive for my desktop. I cloned the old hard drive to the new one, and decided to install ubuntu onto a third drive. The third drive was IDE, the new one is SATA. I disconnected the other hard drive, and so my current set up is a SATA drive with Windows 7, and an IDE drive with Ubuntu (11.04 of course)
Well, I am unable to dual boot between the two, unfortunately, and would like to figure out how. I would like to say the problem is with Windows, since that is the primary drive. No GRUB shows up upon booting when both drives are plugged in, and the Windows Bootloader does not show my installation of Ubuntu, instead it goes right to Windows.
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Apr 15, 2009
I have been battering with FC10 and software RAID for a while now, and hopefully I will have a full working system soon. Basically, I tried using the F10 live CD to setup Software RAID 1 between 1 hard drives for redundancy (I know its not hardware raid but budget is tight) with the following table;
[Code]....
I set these up by using the RAID button on the partition section of the install except swap, which I set-up using the New partition button, created 1 swap partition on each hard drive that didn't take part in RAID. Almost every time I tried to do this install, it halted due to an error with one of the raid partitions and exited the installer. I actually managed it once, in about...ooo 10-15 times of trying but I broke it. After getting very frustrated I decided to build it using just 3 partitions
[Code]....
I left the rest un-touched. This worked fine after completing the install and setting up grub, reboot in to the install. I then installed gparted and cut the drive up further to finish my table on both hard drives. I then used mdadm --create...etc to create my RAID partitions. So I now have
[Code]....
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Jul 9, 2010
I have an old Dell Dimension 2400, currently running winXP. It has a second hard drive attached onto which I'd like to install ubuntu. The drive is visible in My Computer, but when I began the install process, ubuntu didn't give me any option to install on the second drive; it doesn't seem to see it's there. I went into the Setup menu and the drive isn't found there. Does anyone know what I need to do to configure things so that I can get ubuntu onto the second HD?
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Dec 10, 2010
recently sent up another computer as follows:Two sata drives. Windows 7 was installed on the first drive(sda)and booted successfully. This drive was disconnected ( I have had some installs where Unbuntu wipes out the existing C drive eventhough I am installing to D) and Ubuntu was installed to the second drive (sdb). At one point I had to rebuild the grup on the Ubuntu drive and was careful to make it installed on the Ubuntu drive. To my surprise when the PC booted up I saw the Grub menu with a menu entry for Windows. The Windows drive was always the primary drive before the Ubuntu install. I was planning on the Windows drive being the boot drive and using a boot manager to determine where to go from there. If I utilize the BIOS boot option (F12) I can boot each drive individually. I cannot in BIOS set a particular drive to boot - just a hard drive. Everything is working I am just curious why the primary drive does not boot first. IN BIOS the Windows drive is a primary SATA with a lower number that the Ubuntu drive which is listed as a secondary drive.
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Feb 15, 2011
I can only use the Live CD to operate Ubuntu. After typing in the command sudo fdisk -l, I get the following?
Disk /dev/sda: 320.1 GB, 320072933376 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 38913 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
[Code]....
And when I boot without the Live CD, I get the following message in the GNU GRUB Version 1.98-1ubuntu7 window page.
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Jun 4, 2011
I have Ubuntu 11.04 on 1TB HDD and Win 7 on another 1TB HDD. Right now I have to unplug a SATA cable to get to boot into one or the other. What is the best way to be able to pick. I don't care which OS I do it in or which is the primary, if there has to be one. I have an MSI mobo.
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Aug 9, 2011
I've been using ubuntu exclusively on my two laptops lately, for coding and all of my other work. I plan on installing it onto my desktop now for work as well, but I would like to retain Windows 7 so I don't have to worry about compatibility for all of the games I love to play. My question is this:When setting up my partitions, how much space (and what format) should I set aside for windows to write and read games from? I have a 500GB hard drive currently, and was planning the partitions as:
1. Windows 7 (NTFS, setup with Windows installer) ~20 GB
2. File Storage (NTFS, set up with the Ubuntu install partitioner) ~452 GB
3. Ubuntu (EXT3, set up with Ubuntu install partitioner) ~ 20 GB
4. Swap (~2x the size of my RAM) ~ 8GB
The plan is to have Windows install and execute games from the NTFS File Storage partition, while being able to access the same partition from Ubuntu for my documents, code files, music, etc.I don't know if this would work, and I'm also not sure what my file system will be like (windows or linux-y?) if it did. Will this work? Or is there a more elegant solution?
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Mar 8, 2011
I am trying to install ubuntu 10.10 and windows 7 on my hard drive. I want to install both the OS on seperate drives. can anyone tell how to do it? I know that there are screenshots on ubunutu site itself but i am new to ubuntu and I am unable to follow instructions.
I first installed ubuntu 10.10 in dec 2010 using my ubuntu dvd. Now I am reinstalling it again but the setup screens have changed? hows that possible? i mean its the same disk. does anyone know why? or am i drunk.
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Apr 14, 2011
I have recently built a new system which has two internal sata drives. The plan was to install windows 7 one drive and ubuntu 10.10 on the second drive for KVM hosts. I started with the windows install which completed, then I went forward and installed ubuntu 10.10 64bit to my second drive (sdb). During the installation I chose to manually partition my drive. i partitoned the drive (sdb) as follows
/boot - 1gb
/ 40gb
swap 16gb
extended partion of 400gb
I then selected sdb to hold the boot record, as it was set by default to sda (my windows drive). The OS installed fine. I then went to reboot my system so go back into windows, by selecting the first drive in the bios. Once selected the system keeps booting into Ubuntu, no matter which drive I select. Now I checked the grub.cfg file and i see all references to hd1 there is no reference for windows found. I then proceeded to do 'sudo update grub2' this did not pickup any reference to my windows droive to add to the grub menu. When i select the ubuntu drive to boot fom my bios, i get no grub menu appaer it just boots quite happily into ubuntu. Can anyone please provide any resoloution to this, I can provide additonal outputs regarding my partion tables etc. later this evening when I get back from work.
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Jun 8, 2011
Is it possible to create a dual boot system from two separate disk drives each having been created as a single boot computer? I have an 80gb disk drive with Windows XP installed on it. I have a 160gb disk drive with Ubuntu 11 installed on it.
I have installed the Windows disk drive as drive 0 and the Ubuntu disk drive as drive 1 in my computer. Each disk drive was set with cable select pin settings. The computer boots to windows. If at all possible, how would I go about setting up the system to dual boot to both windows and Ubuntu? I have attached screen shots of part -l, gparted 80gb disk and gparted 160gb disk.
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Sep 16, 2015
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.
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Aug 7, 2010
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.
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Jan 18, 2010
Have just installed 9.10, again, many failed attempts previously.Cannot get to boot up and show menu on dual boot with Vista initially,However when I delete the grubenv file the system boots ok and works fine.But does not show the grub menu to choose boot up choices.Got the information to delete the file on some posts elsewhere about booting problem, and tried a longshot and got into Ubuntu for the first time from trying to install now for 3 months!The problem is the file grubenv is created each time so on subsequent boot ups the sytem fails to boot again.The Grub version is 1.97 beta 4, most up to date for Karmic I think, I have seen a version 1.98 but dont think its for Karmic?
Is there a way to modify the grub.cfg file to stop this problem ( all posts say dont touch this file??Or install a script to delete the grubenv file on shutdown as a workaround for me, (I have no idea how to do this whatsoever, I'm not familiar with linux at all)I did read that this problem was fixed/patched in Grub version 2, but dosn't seem.so on my system afetr I updated it when I got into Ubuntu.I couldnt find the patch or fix, I got the information I am on about from this post:URL...It seems to say it was fixed or patched by Colin Watson reading through, but I don't really understand whats being said or how to get the patch on my system if indeed there is one?Sorry for being a bit thick about all this, its a bit beyond my brain now, hope somebody can help out as I have enjoyed my brief bit of fun in Ubuntu.
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May 1, 2011
I've used it once before but got fed up with the boot asking me everytime I turned my laptop on because I wasn't using it enough. I have Windows 7 on drive C . I want to keep it on drive C. I have several 1.5TB+ drives, and one of them is not being used. I want to dedicate it to Ubuntu, and be able to do a dual boot with my Windows 7 install. Is this possible? If it is, what about when this drive is not connected to my laptop? Will that mess up the boot process?
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Jan 3, 2011
I have rebuilt my laptop to a dual boot of Ubuntu 10.10 and Windows 7 - if only iTunes would work under wine I wouldn't even have to worry about Windows, but that is the penalty for using an Apple iPod!
Anyway how do I go about about editing the boot options menu? Following the kernel upgrade in the Ubuntu updates I now have two entries for Ubuntu and would like to just tidy it up.
If it is risky let me know because I have the systems working just nice, and really wouldn't want to trash them just for something cosmetic.
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