Re: Dual Boot, Grub, FC3-WinXpSP2, 2 drives. No go.

[Robert Locke <lists ralii com>]

On Mon, 2005-02-28 at 15:18 -0500, Nat Gross wrote:
> Robert Locke wrote:
> 
> >On Mon, 2005-02-28 at 14:06 -0500, Nat Gross wrote:
> >  
> >
> >>Robert Locke wrote:
> >>
> >>    
> >>
> >>>On Mon, 2005-02-28 at 13:18 -0500, Nat Gross wrote:

<snip>

> >I guess you need to define which "partition" contains the "WINDOWS"
> >directory.  That is the one that you would be "booting" from.  So is
> >that on hdb1 or hdb5.....
> >
> >But I must admit that my Windows boot process knowledge is getting
> >mighty rusty, now that I use VMWare to run it.
> >
> >As I recall, the Windows bootloader is mighty cheesy....  It simply
> >pointed to the first sector of the "active" partition....  I wonder if
> >playing with hide and unhide in grub might help.  Can you hide a whole
> >drive or just a partition, haven't had to do one myself?  But that way
> >you might be able to allow Windows to think it is the only drive again
> >which is perhaps what it is expecting?  Windows may be trying to
> >interpret the first drive's partition table and getting itself confused
> >as it tried to boot....
> >  
> >
> Grub intercepts the boot.
> 

Well, that's open for a little interpretation....

chainloader is essentially just passing control back to Windows to boot
itself.  The Windows MBR component is what is replaced/intercepted by
GRUB.  But the chainloader line is execute sector +1 on the rootnoverify
line.  Generally Windows has historically held the NTLDR executable
there that then reads the boot.ini file and performs it's boot.....

--Rob