Question about dual booting (or something similar)

[Giulio Sorrentino]

David Le wrote:

>Hi,
>
>I have 2 separated disks and 1 PC.
>-Disk 1 installed Windows XP originally.
>-Disk 2 installed FC1 by me separately.
>
>Currently, I have to swap between Disk 1 and Disk 2
>when I boot-up my PC. It is very inconvenient so I
>want to setup dual-boot such that I am able to select
>the OS at the boot-up time and, in the futre, I can
>always switch back to single boot with Windows XP disk
>only.
>I'm not sure if Linux boot loader will change any
>thing on the master boot record of Disk1 (Windows XP)
>such that I cannot boot Disk1 without Disk2 attached?
>I still need Disk 1 for other critical tasks so I'd
>like to leave Disk 1 untouched as much as I can. 
>
>Your answer is appreciated.
>
>--david le.
>  
>
I assume that you want to put linux as primary master and windows as 
primary slave.

What you want to do is not safe: windows xp has been installed on 
primary master as linux; so every "hard riferiment" (if they exist) on 
windows are on primary master: if you switch and they exists are lost; 
so DO A BACKUP COPY BEFORE START (i suggest you to do an hard disk image).
If on linux hard disk are any vaft/ntfs partition destroy it or reformat 
in any filesystem that windows does not recognize.

If you want to keep them separate i suggest you to boot with the 
recovery console and reinstall windows boot loader as primary slave.
After you have to control that the c:\boot.ini file has been modified 
for searching windows directory on primary slave: if it don't you have 
to modify it.
You should have a line similar to: 
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(0)\WINNT="Microsoft Windows XP 
Professional" /fastdetect
I suggest you to do a bertpe (http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/) cd and 
integrate in it the norton ghost 8.

Then try to boot and if it works you simply have to  modify the grub 
configuration as suggested; if it does not works you have to restore the 
disk as primary master and run norton ghost to have "roll back" with the 
hard disk image.