A few weeks ago, I posted a question on this dual boot set-up using one hard drive. Thanks to the excellent advice, my install was very succesful and the GRUB bootloader worked like a charm. Well, I aboslutely fell in love with Mandrake and have attempted to do a more permanent reinstall (one 20 gig drive holding both Win2K and Mandrake was not enough).
For this I changed my setup a little. I formatted and reinstalled Windoze on the 20 gig primary master. Everything went well, except when windows rebooted during the install, Grub was still in the MBR. I had to boot to a DOS floppy and clear the MBR using fdisk /mbr before continueing the Windows install. Then, I added another 20 gig primary slave and installed Linux on this the hdb. The install when fine. Again, I choose GRUB as my bootloader. It detected both installs. I rebooted hoping to see GRUB but instead all I got was “Invalid boot disk in a: Please insert Boot Disk”. I used the Mandrake CD to reinstall the bootloader. I got the same results. So, I rewrote the MBR to a windows MBR using Mandrake CD. Same results. So, I tried using FDISK to repair the MBR. Same results.
Hmm…I’d say the reason it didn’t go well is that when you tried to get grub to create acces to the previous mandrake installation, the devices were placed in different order. I mean, what used be your hda2 (maybe that was your linux ext.2/3) is now probably hdb1 or something. If you want a working dual boot system you have to first install win2k and then linux and its bootloader. The easiest way for you is probably to reinstall both systems. Of course, you might be able to migrate your settings from win2k somehow, but don’t ask me how…Besides, I don’t understand why you should use grub as your bootloader. I’m using a triple-boot configuration (mandrake, winxp, win2k) and lilo is loading all them for me.
By the way, did you check that you haven’t disabled writing to mbr in bios?
Try it again with both disks present when Windows is installed. Clear the partitions during the installation so that Windows takes over the whole disk. Let it ignore the second disk if you want.
Then install Mandrake. Make sure the boot loader is written to the MBR of the first disk.
I wish I could explain what is happening, but I had the same results adding a second drive to my wife’s PC running XP. Boot record got mangled and I could only get it back by re-installing Windows. That’s not to say it can’t be done, just that I couldn’t do it.
I’m with you on the Mandrake love. Love, love, love Mandrake Linux. Mandrake, TiVo and my Opera browser are three of the things I’m not sure I’d want to live without.
I’m afraid, though, that I’m just a complete Idiot. When I installed Mandrake, I changed the BIOS boot order so that the CD-ROM was first. Well, I must have accidently removed IDE Harddrive. Opps, no wonder it couldn’t boot. I’ve fix the problem and everything to flowing nicely.
Leenmi, I’m with you on the Mandrake and TiVo, but I prefer Firebird over Opera.