Dual Booting with 2 Hard Drives

Hello,
I am going to attempt a Dual Boot between Vista and Unbuntu
I Want Vista on one and Unbuntu on the other. (Vista already installed)
2 110gb HDD's

I was wondering if there was any special trick or catch involved when dual booting from 2 different hard drives.

Thanks

 

Nothing special. Follow the guides in Ceenote's thread.

You don't need to partition the drives, and better to have both the HDDs in the same mode - IDE/AHCI.

 

Thanks for the quick response.
I have barely any Dual Booting Experience. The only Dual booting experience ive had was when i dual booted Fedora and the Playstation 3 OS.

I Read online in some places that it seemed that GRUB Caused problems for users when dual booting from 2 hard drives. Some people said that when you want to switch OSes, You Disconnect one of the Hard drives, etc

 

It is easier with more than one drive, since partitioning is a lot easier. Whoever said it is harder should be smacked.

Only trick would be to set the Linux drive as boot in the BIOS, and use GRUB to chainload Windows when needed, or Windows will always load.

 

Thing is
I want Windows Vista to be the Dominant OS

 

Still use the same setup as before, but set Windows above Linux in GRUB. If you boot directly from the Windows drive, you'll never get an option to boot into Ubuntu.

 

I read online about some Grub21 error with dual booting with 2 hard drives

(Sorry about all the questions, Im just nervous lol)

 

One last thing, Even if Linux is installed on one hard drive, Can i still use that hard drive to store Data that windows Vista can access?

 

Windows Vista has very limited read capabilities of Linux FSs, let alone write. Use ext2fs to read ext3, but thats about all Windows can do.

 

Thanks for the reply
Should i just partion the D: (2nd hard drive) so that i have like 80gb left on it that Linux wont use?

 

You can do that. You could assign Linux any FS you like, then share an NTFS partition between Linux and Windows.

 

You can partition a small space for Linux on the second drive, and leave a lot of space for data. Linux isn't a space hog, so even 6-10GB should be plenty, as long as you aren't storing data there.

Installing GRUB on the second drive shouldn't be that nerve wracking like it is on a single drive, because if GRUB can't load, you can tell the BIOS to boot the Windows drive directly.

 

Just be aware that Linux terminology is very different than Windows.
C: drive will be sda and D: drive will be sdb. Then any partitions on those drives are labeled 1, 2, etc. If C: drive has only one partition, and that partition has Vista, then Vista is on sda1.

GRUB, unfortunately, uses different terminology. hd0 is the first drive, and hd1 is the second.The first partition on the first drive would be recognized as hd0,1.

I'd suggest downloading and burning to a bootable disc GParted Live. Create a bootable CD that lets you look at your drives, create partitions, etc. If you have both drives installed and spin a GParted disc it'll show you both drives and the partitions on those drives. You choose drives by clicking on the box in the upper right hand corner.

You could use GParted to create two partitions on the second drive. Format one as ext3, and the other as ntfs. To stay away from the "4 primary partitions" rule, you could create one extended partition out of the entire drive, then create as many logical partitions as you wanted.

You could also create /, swap, and /home partitions inside the Linux area, but if you want to keep it simple just create one ext3.

When you go to install Ubuntu, install it to the ext3 partition on sdb. Let GRUB install Stage 1 to hd0. Except for GRUB tweaking the Vista MBR, which gives you the option of operating systems when the PC starts up, Vista will be left alone, Ubuntu will install itself to the ext3 partition on sdb, and you'll have an ntfs partition for shared data.

Those are broadbrush strokes. Many details along the way.

When you get Ubuntu installed, go to the Ubuntu repositories and find "start-up manager". Install it. That gives you an easy GUI for picking which OS to start first.

 

That was very confusing D:
Mind clearing it up a little?
Doesnt Vista have a Built in Partitioner already? I wont have to use Gparted right?

 

Vista's built-in partitioner is probably more reliable for shrinking the Vista partition. But that doesn't help you if you're going to install Ubuntu to the second drive. Use Gparted for that. Simplest thing to do would be format the entire drive to ext3 or unallocated and let Ubuntu auto-install to it. Ubuntu should install Stage 1 of GRUB to the Windows drive and everything should work fine. "Should" is a very big word here - make sure you can rebuild Windows if need be and save your personal data first.