[K12OSN] Dual boot using separate hard drives

[Gavin Chester]

On Thu, 2005-06-02 at 10:06 -0600, John P. Conlon wrote:
> To ensure marital harmony and bliss I am about to put together a dual 
> boot machine using 2 hard drives.  The plan is for one drive to be 
> Windows XP and the other to be K12LTSP as a stand alone.  When I fdisk 
> the windows drive do I need to leave a small portion of the drive for 
> Grub to be installed in?  If I do need to leave some how big does the 
> piece need to be?
> 
> Thanks
> Pat
> 

This may not be the answer you're looking for, but FWIW I find great
service in putting each drive in a harddrive caddy.  You don't specify
your drive type in your post, but these caddies have been available for
SCSI and IDE for some time, and are now available for SATA.  Everything
is simplified to deciding which drive - Windows or Linux - to pop in at
the time of bootup to totally change the personality of the PC.  This
assumes you go through a complete install of each system on each
drive.  

The only drawback of this is that you can't exchange files between
systems on each drive.  If you need that then you do need to have both
drives active as master and slave (assuming IDE or SATA) at once.  In
that case simply ensure you have Windows installed on your primary drive
and then start your Linux install and the installation will take care of
creating the appropriate boot partition for grub or lilo without
touching your Windows setup.  HTH.  

I hope that's up to date with current procedures - I haven't had to do
what you're attempting for a few years ;-) 

-- 
Regards, 
        Gavin Chester