My earlier reply apparently was bumped because of a too-large attached 
doc file. (It WAS large--sorry.) Here's the same content, but in a much 
smaller text file.

There's a good discussion of boot techniques in chapter 4 of O'Reilly's 
"Linux in a Nutshell". The attached doc file discusses using the 
NT/2K/XP boot loader & boot.ini to multi-boot in a mixed Windows/Linux 
environment. It's based on the O'Reilly chapter and reflects my own 
experience. My current boot.ini allows me to choose between NT, 2 
different XPs, and 4 different Linux installations. I've not tried using 
it with a removable.

You may email me direct if you have any questions.

-mj-

Mark Jarvis
m.jarvis@cox.net

Bryce C wrote:

> Grub's not going to work in this setup. Its configuration is read when
> it loads and if its configuration (on the removable, linux drive) isn't
> readable, it will just stop.
> I can't help with M$ bootloader, though I did get the win2k bootloader
> to boot linux once, just to see how its done. There are plenty of
> tutorials to do this on the internet and your situation shouldn't
> provide any difficulties with them at all.
> My recommendation for this setup would be to use lilo. lilo writes its
> config to the MBR whenever `lilo` is run. This makes it self-sustaining,
> free from any support.
> I will also point out there are many other great bootloaders out there.
> I can't remember the name of my favourite "alternative" bootloader, but
> I'll post later when I find it. Something like Boot Manager i think.
> 
> Good luck
> 
> On Thu, 2004-07-15 at 14:28, Stephen Wiebelhaus wrote:
> 
>>I'm setting up a system to dual boot WinXP and Linux. Linux is
>>installed on the secondary hard drive, which is a removable
>>drive(problem). I can't get either the WinXp boot loader to work, or
>>grub.
>> 
>>Using grub, it works fine as long as the removable drive is installed.
>>But, if I remove the drive with Linux, Grub locks up on boot, and
>>won't do anything, won't boot windows either. Grub is installed on the
>>master boot record, primary drive. I want to be able to run WinXP with
>>a 3rd drive in the removable slot. How can I configure Grub so that it
>>will boot WinXp when the second drive(Linux) is not present.
>> 
>>So I tried to do things with WinXP's bootloader. It doesn't care if
>>that second drive is in or not, it can still boot WinXP. For this I
>>installed Grub on the boot partition of the linux drive. The Linux
>>drive is partitioned: hdb1 swap 200MB, hdb2 /    4gigs. When
>>installing Suse linux, it gave me two options for where to place Grub,
>>master boot record or hdb2. So I choose option hdb2. I setup WinXP
>>boot config to either boot WinXP, or boot from the second partition of
>>the secondary harddrive, should be hdb2. But, when I select linux, it
>>just stops.
>> 
>>So, how can I get this to work, either using Grub or WinXp bootloader
>>is fine.
>>
>>Hompage www.public.asu.edu/~swiebel/index.html
>>
>>
>>______________________________________________________________________
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