GRUB Boot Loader and further consequences

[None of the above]

My PC is dual boot with WinXP on the master drive and Suse Linux on the slave.
I now wish to give Vista (Beta 2) a whirl on a separate hard drive. Would any problems ensue if I simply disconnected the present drives and used the Vista HDD in splendid isolation?
The long and the short of it is that I don't know where the boot loader resides and I don't want to be faced with a fresh install which sometimes happens when I have a 'delve'.

Your assistance is humbly solicited,

N o t a

[Saab Dastard]

If you physically disconnect your existing disks and insert a third disk, you will have no problem.

To return to your original configuration, simply disconnect the Vista drive and reconnect the original disks as they were before.

Remember to note which was on which IDE channel, or which was primary / slave if on the same channel (all hard disks look frighteningly similar when it comes to reconnecting them).

SD

[None of the above]

Many thanks for your reply Saab D. I'll have a go later today and I'm looking forward to see what Vista has to offer. I think my machine will just about handle it.
First I have to go and trim the front hedge!

Many thanks,

N o t a

[Ant]

Just be aware thet repeated removal/insertion of the IDE cable to the HDD runs the risk of snapping one of the pins (as happened to me). Tears at bed-time!

[BOFH]

Just be aware thet repeated removal/insertion of the IDE cable to the HDD runs the risk of snapping one of the pins (as happened to me). Tears at bed-time!

Funny you should mention that - I did that today with a brand-new 80GB laptop drive :{ .

BTW None of the above, if you have a spare IDE cable it might be easier to attatch it to the Vista HDD and switch them at the motherboard end, depending on the layout of your internals, to get around the pitfalls Saab mentioned.

BOFH

[None of the above]

Ant & BOFH.............

Thanks for those points you raise. I must admit that I hadn't given too much thought to the wear and tear aspect so I'll dig out the spare IDE cable in the cupboard.
Incidentally, I installed Vista OK although it took a little longer than I anticipated. I've had an initial recce and it's rather more of a leap from XP than XP was from Win98. The biggest snag so far is the inability of the system to do anything with my printer although it is listed on the dropdown menu of the printer installation wizard. Still, 'tis early days

Thanks again, Gents

N o t a

[asuweb]

Yeah, vista install certainally took a while. I've been using it for a month now and am quite impressed. Seems like a vast improvement on XP. I'm not usually a microsoft fan (much prefer linux) but impressed with vista so far.

What printer are you using?

[Keef]

I would suspect that you could now install the Vista and the other drives, and tweak Grub to boot the appropriate one. Grub will certainly handle XP and three different Linuxes; whether two MS products would co-exist is a different question!

[None of the above]

asuweb.......

The printer is an HP Deskjet 5550 and I've tried using both the original disk (as commanded) and letting Vista search out the driver for me but they both came to ought.

keef.............

Things have moved on a little now. Having got all my photos and documents across to Vista I decided to see if I could remove GRUB and return this PC to the previous set up, ie: WinXP on the master drive and use the slave as a back up for all my files. I was reluctant to remove the boot loader prior to this as I could see things going spectacularly wrong. However, I managed to do so without tears being shed and I hope to have another PC very shortly which I will use as dedicated Linux machine.

Bit of thread drift now...........

Having formatted the slave HDD to NTFS (from FAT32 Linux) Partition Magic tells me that I have

Disk 1 (Master)

NTFS 78,152.1MB Primary
Unallocated 7.8MB Primary

Disk 2 (Slave)

Unallocated 7.8 Primary
Extended 78,152.1MB Primary
NTFS 78,152.1MB Logical

With, in each case, details of used/unused space.

I'm a bit puzzled about the Primary/Logical info. Shouldn't there just be one entry here? I suspect that I might have been a bit cack handed with Partition Magic.

Anyway..... if you have been, thanks for reading, Gentlemen.

N o t a

[Saab Dastard]

It looks like you have created an Extended partition with Partition Magic, and then created a single Logical partition taking up all the available space in the Extended partition.

I seem to recall that you can have a maximum of 4 partitions on a disk, due to the way that the MBR is structured. Of these, at least 3 must be Primary partitions, with the 4th being either a Primary or Extended partition. The extended partition may then have multiple Logical partitions created within it. The upper limit escapes me at the moment, but the practical limits are disk size and drive letter!

You can just leave things as they are, or if you wish, use PM to remove the logical and extended partitions and simply create a Primary partition instead. Yes, it is data destructive!

SD

[None of the above]

Saab D........

Thanks for your advice. I've tidied up HDD 2 to a single primary partition using PM and reinstated the data.

Much obliged!

N o t a