Linux install/booting question.

[Perd Hapley]

I have two physical hard drives in my computer; one a rather small drive with an operating system and applications, the other, larger one with documents, music, etc.

Let's say I have OpenSUSE install herself on the larger hard drive. I would prefer my computer to boot the first OS automatically, and only wake up little SUSE if I use the BIOS's boot menu at start up, to select her hard drive.

If I understand correctly, SUSE's default behavior is to put GRUB in her own extended partition. The other options, I believe, are to stick GRUB in root, or in the MBR. I want the last one, yes?


Disclaimer: I understand that I could list both of my operating systems in the same boot loader, or that I could just install SUSE in a virtual machine. I am not interested in doing that at this time.

[CNYCacher]

I have two physical hard drives in my computer; one a rather small drive with an operating system and applications, the other, larger one with documents, music, etc.

Let's say I have OpenSUSE install herself on the larger hard drive. I would prefer my computer to boot the first OS automatically, and only wake up little SUSE if I use the BIOS's boot menu at start up, to select her hard drive.

If I understand correctly, SUSE's default behavior is to put GRUB in her own extended partition. The other options, I believe, are to stick GRUB in root, or in the MBR. I want the last one, yes?


Disclaimer: I understand that I could list both of my operating systems in the same boot loader, or that I could just install SUSE in a virtual machine. I am not interested in doing that at this time.

The install's job is to make the disk bootable.  You don't need to outsmart it somehow.  Just make sure that it doesn't touch your smaller drive.  The larger drive will wind up booting the suse system if you boot from that drive, which you will do using bios menus.

[Jim147]

I'm thinking if the installer sees the small drive as HD0, it is going to try to stick grub there. Which will give you that GRUB menu every time you boot.

Maybe unhook the small drive, install beside your media on the larger drive then reconnect the small drive.

jim

[mtnbkr]

It has been a long time since I've built a dual-boot system, but is it still possible to use the Windows boot menu to load Grub when you want to boot Linux?

This looks like the process I remember: http://jaeger.morpheus.net/linux/ntldr.php

The goal is to have the single Windows Boot Menu and have LiLo automatically boot Linux if you select that option from the Win Boot Menu.  It worked great with WinNT4.0 and Slackware, Redhat, or SuSE.  I don't know how well it would work with the current Windows menu and Grub though.

Chris

[zahc]

If I understand what you want correctly, I would physically unplug the smaller HDD, and then install SUSE onto the larger HDD. It will put a bootloader onto its own MBR.

When you start the system, the BIOS will let you choose which HDD to boot. Both should be bootable.

Yes, it is possible to put a bootloader on only one drive, which can boot either system. However, just find it easier to keep hard drives separate. Hey, you can always yank one out and stick it in another system and it will boot.

[GigaBuist]

I wouldn't unplug the smaller HD that currently contains Windows before installing SuSE.  You'll just end up letting the OS think you've got one disk and your mount points might be all mucked up as it'll think it's running on /dev/hda or /dev/sda instead of /dev/sdb or /dev/hdb.  Then again I've seen stuff in /etc/fstab lately that isn't device specific, using UUIDs to ID disks, but I'm not familiar with how SuSE does it these days.

At the very best you'll miss the installer picking up your Windows partition and nicely setting up an automount for it on the Linux side.

Every Linux installer I've used in the last 13 years, to the best of my memory, was pretty flexible on where it put its bootloader.  It will not silently mash something into place without asking you.  Just let it know to install to /dev/hdb or /dev/sdb (the MBR on your second disk), not /dev/hba, /dev/sda (MBR on the first disk), /dev/hdb1, or /dev/sdb1 (boot record on the first partition of the second disk)

By sticking GRUB on the MBR of the second disk you'll be able to use your BIOS to select which system to boot.

[Perd Hapley]

Thanks for the suggestions. I did disconnect the 80G drive and then let SUSE do the regular, default boot stuff.

Here's the dumb part. The hard drive was one NTFS partition of 233 GB. SUSE reduced that partition to 140, so she could have 90-something for herself (plus swap file). The installer let me reduce the / partition to 25, but refused to expand the NTFS partition. So after install, I had 60-plus GB on the other side of the drive,  that couldn't be added back on to my old doc. storage partition, w/o moving both SUSE partitions, and who knows if I could boot back into SUSE then?

So I had to use Parted Magic to delete the SUSE partitions, expand the NTFS partition, then create the partitions SUSE would need. Which worked out fine, and I guess I should have known to do my own partitioning before install. Still, if the installer can reduce a pre-existing partition, why can't it expand it?

[CNYCacher]

Thanks for the suggestions. I did disconnect the 80G drive and then let SUSE do the regular, default boot stuff.

Here's the dumb part. The hard drive was one NTFS partition of 233 GB. SUSE reduced that partition to 140, so she could have 90-something for herself (plus swap file). The installer let me reduce the / partition to 25, but refused to expand the NTFS partition. So after install, I had 60-plus GB on the other side of the drive,  that couldn't be added back on to my old doc. storage partition, w/o moving both SUSE partitions, and who knows if I could boot back into SUSE then?

So I had to use Parted Magic to delete the SUSE partitions, expand the NTFS partition, then create the partitions SUSE would need. Which worked out fine, and I guess I should have known to do my own partitioning before install. Still, if the installer can reduce a pre-existing partition, why can't it expand it?

It probably can, if there is space.  I am guessing that the 25g partition you made for suse was in the middle of the drive.  If it was at the end of the drive you could have expanded the first partition.

[Perd Hapley]

It probably can, if there is space.  I am guessing that the 25g partition you made for suse was in the middle of the drive.  If it was at the end of the drive you could have expanded the first partition.

But at the time, it hadn't created the SUSE partitions yet. I didn't know where the new partitions would be, until after the first install.