Successfully Booting Three OS on Three Harddrives with GRUB

Can someone post what he said here?

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Jay
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?? Posted on: 2004/10/6 5:05
Not much of a poster yet!
Joined: 2004/9/25
From: Rochester, NY
Posts: 14
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Successfully Booting Three OS on Three Harddrives with GRUB
Thought I'd share a recent success story configuring my system to display a Boot Menu on startup with three OS.

My Linux play system is a Compaq AP550 Workstation. It came to me with an 8 GIG SCSI HD and I've added two IDE drives. (Compaq does not support mixing the two drive types but it seems to work anyway)

The three drives are set up as follows:
9 GIG SCSI - Windows XP Pro
1.6 GIG IDE - Windows 98 SE on IDE1 via Cable Select jumper setting
8.0 GIG IDE - SimplyMepis on IDE2 via Cable Select jumper setting

All drives were correctly recognised by the BIOS and SimplyMepis.

Both of the Windows drives had working OS installs on them before I started my project but I was not dual booting them at the time.

I added the 8 GIG drive and installed several versions of Mepis and a number of other distros before settling on SimplyMepis. (What a great accomplishment, Warren and All !)

When I first installed SM to the harddrive, it successfully recognized both the Linux and W98 OS and I could select them from the Start Menu. (along with an option for the newer unstable version of SM and the usual MEMTEST options)

After a number of reinstalls (did I mention I don't really know what I'm doing ?) the boot menu lost the W98 option. After trying many different combinations using the GRUB repair utility I finally gave up and decided to try manully configuring the menu.lst file.

Although I found many post that discussed this subject on the Mepis forums, I couldn't seem to find one that fit my circumstances or that I was experienced enough to understand.

I ended up doing a search in Google and found a couple of post/articles that really applied to what I was trying to do.

Adding the W98 OS to the menu was pretty straight-forward as many post clearly demonstrate. You mostly just need to know how to 'Cut & Paste' and modify the drive identifier.

Adding the XP OS wasn't going well until I found a post that explained that XP needs to think it's the first boot device. The article included the commands to swap the drives in the config file.

The final results are in the copy of my /boot/grub/menu.lst file below:

title MEPIS at hdb1, kernel 2.4.26
kernel (hd1,0)/boot/vmlinuz-2.4.26 root=/dev/hdb1 nomce quiet splash=verbose vga=791 hdc=ide-scsi
initrd (hd1,0)/boot/initrd.mepis
savedefault

title MEPIS at hdb1, kernel 2.6.7 #IDE Drive on Secondary
kernel (hd1,0)/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.7 root=/dev/hdb1 nomce psmouse.proto=imps quiet splash=verbose vga=791
initrd (hd1,0)/boot/initrd.mepis
savedefault

title Windows 98 SE at hda0 #IDE Drive on Primary
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
makeactive
chainloader +1
splash=verbose vga=791
savedefault

title Windows XP at sda0 #SCSI Drive
map (hd0) (hd2) #This is the trick required
map (hd2) (hd0) #by XP to boot successfully
rootnoverify (hd2,0)
chainloader +1
makeactive

title MEMTEST
kernel /boot/memtest86.bin

Hope my babbling was somewhat understandable and that this post helps another Newbie down the road.

Jay

Your post just helped me figure out how to get my dual boot going.
I have two SATA drives, Mepis on one and WinXP on the other.
I couldn't get XP to boot.

My menu.lst before:

title MEPIS at sdb1, kernel 2.6.10
kernel (hd0,0)/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.10 root=/dev/sdb1 nomce psmouse.proto=imps quiet splash=verbose vga=791
initrd (hd0,0)/boot/initrd.splash
savedefault

title Windows XP at sdb1
rootnoverify (hd1,0)
chainloader +1
savedefault

And after:

title MEPIS at sda1, kernel 2.6.10
kernel (hd0,0)/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.10 root=/dev/sda1 nomce psmouse.proto=imps quiet splash=verbose vga=791
initrd (hd0,0)/boot/initrd.splash
savedefault

title Windows XP at sdb1
map (hd1) (hd0)
map (hd0) (hd1)
rootnoverify (hd1,0)
chainloader +1
makeactive
savedefault

Works perfectly now.
Thanks a bunch!