Dual boot on 2 drives

From openSUSE

If you are using openSUSE 11.1 or a higher version, you should not have to worry about any of the following information as YaST should take care of this for you.

If you are using an older version of openSUSE/SUSE Linux and have both Windows and Linux installed on the same computer, but on separate drives, some changes may need to be made to GRUB's configuration. To ensure that both systems are bootable and more importantly GRUB can start both systems. It should not matter if your computer has just SATA disks or just PATA (normal IDE) disks.

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Booting Windows Vista from the first hard drive

To enable the booting of Vista add the following to /boot/grub/menu.lst under the "Windows" section:

title Windows Vista
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
savedefault
makeactive
chainloader +1

Starting Windows from a hard disk other than the first hard disk

Because Windows must be started from the first hard disk, you need to use the map command in the GRUB configuration file. If Windows is installed on a third hard disk, change (hd1,0) to (hd2,0)

Add the following to /boot/grub/menu.lst under the "Windows" section:

map (hd0,0) (hd1,0)
map (hd1,0) (hd0,0)
rootnoverify (hd1,0)
makeactive
chainloader +1

• The map commands change the way GRUB sees your hard drives, in this case swapping hd1 (hard disk 1) with hd2 (hard disk 2).
• The root command tells grub which hard drive to boot.

GRUB should then give you the option to boot into Windows on the second drive. Very Handy !!.

See Also

• http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual/html_node/map.html
• http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual/grub.html#Naming-convention
• Installing SUSE with Windows 7

--Seides 05:10, 7 December 2008 (UTC)