How-to Dual Boot Windows and Linux on a System with both Sata and IDE Drives (cont.)  

How to Recover your Linux Installations:

Now that you have Windows on your sata drive, the next step is to recover your Linux installations. They are still there, but your MBR has been written over by your new windows XP installation, so grub is no longer resident on the MBR of your primary master ide drive.

This recovery procedure assumes that you already had grub resident (and previously installed) on the master boot record. I had SuSE 10 beta 2  installed using grub. It also assumes that you had your original Windows installation on the first partition on your primary master drive.

For this scenario, you need to know where your Linux installation is on your hard drive, both the drive and partition designation that it is installed on.

1. Pop in your SuSE cdrom disk #1 in your cdrom drive

2. At the SuSE welcome screen, choose "Rescue."

3. The kernel will load to a command line interface. Type in root as the user.

4. Mount the drive that your Linux distro is resident on. In my case;

mount /dev/sda9 /mnt

5. chroot to the mnt directory. This mounts your Linux partition just as if you booted directly into it.

chroot /mnt

6. Now you should be in the root directory of your Linux distro. you can check this by typing ls to see the directory structure.

7. Install grub to the MBR of your primary master ide drive;

grub-install /dev/hda

You should just get a list of the device.menu list displayed as grub installs itself to the MBR, without any errors.

Once this is done, you can reboot the system, by typing in reboot at the console. make sure that you removed the SuSE install disk before rebooting.


What just happened?

To recap;

• You had an original installation of Windows on your primary master ide drive, as well as one Linux distro on any hard drive on your system, booting from grub.
• Following the instructions on page 1, you also just installed Windows on the sata drive on the first partition of that drive. The MBR was written over during the installation by Windows when you installed it on the sata drive. But, the boot.ini file has two entries for Windows, one for the sata installation, and one on the ide drive. 
• You just re-installed grub to the MBR of the primary master ide drive, but the boot.ini file for Windows is still there on the first partition of the Windows ide installation, where grub will now look for it.

When you reboot your system, grub will come up, where you will see your boot options that are in your Linux /boot/menu.lst file. You can now boot your Linux distros or choose Windows. When you choose Windows, you still get the option to boot either the sata installation or the original ide installation.