Hi,
I have two 40GB hard drives.
Windows XP is installed on the primary master. Linux is installed on the primary slave. They BOTH have MBRs written to the drives. Therefore I can tell my BIOS to boot HDD0 and I get XP, and with HDD1 I get the GRUB bootloader.

My problem is that Grub won't load XP if I boot to HDD1(primary slave). It will load linux just fine, but it executes the grub.conf commands and doesn't boot XP.

By the way, I told Linux on install to reverse the IDE numbers when it refers to them. That's the only way I could get it to write the MBR on the slave drive. So to linux(and grub) it's on hd0 when it's physically on hd1 and vice-versa.

Maybe I have a number wrong. Here's the grub.conf:

title Windows XP
rootnoverify (hd1,0)
makeactive
chainloader +1
boot

And I forget exactly the Linux one but it works fine and it's root(hd0,0).

Anything to try?

Thanks!

yeprz........its xp's boot.ini and not GRUb or LILIO which is responsible for loading windows xp check ur boot.ini is corrupted or not!

Well you can't do boot Windows XP both ways. Otherwise you must edit boot.ini appropriately each time you change the boot drive. Becuase in boot.ini the disk no needs to be changed. And if you are not even getting the NT boot loader screen than your BIOS could be hiding second HD. Anyway install grub on pri HD that's much better way to boot.

.jareeN.

Ok well that isn't really possible.

So there's no way to get grub to boot to primary MBR?

It works if selected in BIOS.

replace by this:
title Windows XP
chainloader (hd1,0)+1

this will make it work

tru

I'm having exactly the same problem you are; Red Hat 8 won't allow me to boot Windows 2000 - even though it's on a separate HD with it's own MBR.

I suspect it has something to do with Red Hat's inability to read NTFS drives.

I believe this for these reasons:

1. I can boot Win 2K by switching the boot sequence in the BIOS.

2. Red Hat will not allow me to access the Win 2k drive (when I'm trying from KDE) because it doesn't recognize the file system.

3. Before I installed Red Hat 8.0 I was using SuSE Personal 7.3; using that distribution I was able to read (but not write to) the Win 2k disk and boot Windows using Lilo.

I haven't yet been able to recompile the kernel to enable NTFS support. I am still a little green concerning linux.

I hope that helps you in some way.
Makki

I have a similar problem, except I only have one Hard Disk. (30 GB) I created a 15 GB partition for Win XP and left 15 GB for Mandrake Linux. I then installed Mandrake Linux. All went well, and LILO provides the possibility to boot with Windows. But when I choose to boot with Windows, I get a message saying it is impossible to boot since the boot.ini file is corrupted. I guess I must edit this file, but how ?