[RESOLVED] Problem dual booting OS's

Okay, I have a PATA drive and a SATA drive. On the SATA drive are 2 NTFS partitions. One is Windows XP SP2. The PATA drive is there for installing different Linux distro's and playing around with that OS as I try to figure out which one I might want to dive into.

I installed Ubuntu 6.10 on the PATA drive and when I set my BIOS to look at the PATA drive first I get a boot menu where I can select Windows XP if I want to go there and everything boots fine. If I set my BIOS back to looking at the SATA drive first I don't even get the menu - it just boots straight into Windows XP. That's perfect and how I want it.

I removed my Ubuntu PATA drive and installed another PATA drive so I could install Freespire 1.0.13. Everything went well but I found that when I changed the BIOS setting to look at the SATA drive first and only boot from there, offering no boot menu which is what I wanted, I get the Freespire boot menu. So this is different from how the Ubuntu setup works and it's a small problem. Sometimes I'll remote into my XP machine and need to reboot. Now I can't do that and get back into XP because the Freespire boot menu comes up even when the SATA drive is the first hard drive to boot from in the list in my BIOS.

Does anyone know how to fix this? I haven't yet simply disconnected the PATA drive with Freespire on it to see if that's all that needs to be done. I can definitely do that and let you know what happens if that's the first step. I only just now thought of it (duh). Let me know what you all think. Thanks.

The only thing I can think of is that when you installed Freespire onto your PATA it put some files onto the SATA drive.

Disconnect the PATA drive and see what happens. If you still get the Freespire Boot Menu you will need to use the XP Recovery console to fix the boot process. Once that is done I would think that you can reinstall whatever version of Linux you want onto the PATA drive but make sure that you physically disconnect the SATA drive first.

Doc

That's a great idea, disconnecting the SATA drive before installing Linux on the PATA drive. I hadn't thought of that one. I'll disconnect the PATA drive and see if the menu comes up. Hopefully it won't. But if it does I'll use the recovery console to fix the boot process. Thanks.

Chris, I like that info. Thanks a ton. I hadn't even thought about making XP the default, but that is what I'd like. Great idea. I appreciate your input.

So I fixed the problem I originally posted about by booting in the XP recovery console and running fixmbr. That did it. First, though, I unplugged the SATA drive and booted to make sure Freespire would boot fine on its own. Than I unplugged the PATA drive and reconnected the SATA drive to see how XP would do and nothing booted. That's when I decided to run fixmbr and it worked perfectly. So now what I'm going to do is disconnect the SATA drive, reconnect the PATA drive and reinstalled Freespire from scratch (hadn't made any changes so it's no big deal). I'll than have to add XP as an option in the GRUB boot menu.

Another option, select which HDD you want to boot from in BIOS.

The option I have been using for years. No bootloader to worry about getting corrupted like that.

That's a good idea, Train. However, I think Freespire installed the boot loader without asking me. It must have seen that I had XP on another disk and thus installed the boot loader. I don't remember it asking me if I wanted to do that.

To stop that, you have to have install each OS seperately on its own drive and the other disconnected while doing the install.

Exactly my thinking, or actually the thinking of someone else on another board. But I"m pretty sure if I do that I will have to add the second disk to the boot loader manually, correct? Unless I just want to use the BIOS setting each time, right?

I do not use a bootloader. Gave up on them years ago.

So you just use the BIOS setting every time you want to switch between OS's?

Yes, that is the wayn I do it.
Got tired of the bootloader gettting messed up and losing stuff.