Dual Boot?

[gumbuc.com]

If i was to buy anouther hardrive lets say a 80GB and i took out my old one with windows 7 and i installed linux unbuntu on my 80GB then i plug back in the hard drive with Windows 7 would it work as dual boot? what would happen?

 

[berry120]

If you're talking about just booting from the one hard drive and swapping over whenever you want to change OS's then it would - provided you set both environments up properly you could just swap between them when you wanted.

It's a bit of a cumbersome approach though - if you definitely want to dual booth, a better idea might be to have both hard drives in there at once, install linux on one and let it install GRUB which will let you select your OS on start up, without having to swap any drives.

 

[gumbuc.com]

If you're talking about just booting from the one hard drive and swapping over whenever you want to change OS's then it would - provided you set both environments up properly you could just swap between them when you wanted.

It's a bit of a cumbersome approach though - if you definitely want to dual booth, a better idea might be to have both hard drives in there at once, install linux on one and let it install GRUB which will let you select your OS on start up, without having to swap any drives.

but what whould happen when there both in would it give me a choice or would i need ot edit bios to run a ciertian hard drive

 

[berry120]

but what whould happen when there both in would it give me a choice or would i need ot edit bios to run a ciertian hard drive

As I said, when you install most easy to use flavours of linux (Ubuntu and varients included) it gives you the option to install GRUB and use it to dual boot. So when your machine boots up, you'll see a menu and you'll just select what OS you want to boot.

If you put both in at once without this approach, then you'll have to select what OS you want to boot from by changing the boot options around in the BIOS (selecting whatever hard drive you want to boot from) - not the nicest of ways to do it.

 

[cboucher]

Just a general heads up when dual-booting linux and windows: Install windows first, then linux. When you install windows it overwrites the boot loader and will create entries for existing OS installations provided they are some version of windows. When you install linux it also overwrites the boot loader, but linux will create entries for non-linux OS installations as well, not just other linux installations.

 

[pwn_n00bs]

In short, NO. You need to use a piece of freeware to dual-boot, or, if it's supported, you can choose a dual-boot option in Linux, during the install. JUST INSTALLING LINUX ON A SEPARATE HARD DRIVE AND CONNECTING IT TO YOUR COMPUTER WILL NOT WORK. When the computer starts up, it refers to a file called "boot.ini", unless you're running Vista or 7, and from there, it knows what OS to start. If you just plug in a hard drive with Linux on it, the boot.ini file is not changed, and so it will just start Windows like it would without the other hard drive.

Enjoy and Please Rate!

Sincerely,
pwn_n00bs

 

[ajsc]

Dual booting is good but how to determine in which sata hard drive the motherboard will search first for the grub. As in sata there is no choice between master and slave. In sata you have sata port 0, port 1, port 2 & port 3 etc but their order is immaterial.

I have heard of a concept of primary and secondary hard disk for sata drives. But how do we actually make a disk either primary or secondary. And will it help me to select which among the two hard disk the motherboard will first look for grub in.

 

[wmorri]

Hi,

You will want to install grub along with whatever disk you install your linux distro on. When it comes to getting grub to work with both there are couple of changes that may need to happen but nothing to drastic.

 

[ajsc]

what changes and what settings

 

[wmorri]

Hi,

You will need to know what disk and what partition all your OS's are on. The simple way to figure that out is to do an fdisk -l in a terminal. Then we can check your menu.lst file to make sure that you every thing matches up.

Cheers!