Vista and F9 Dual boot seperate hard drives.

[Anniedog]

Due to some hard drive issues on my amd below I am going to have to do some playing around and install a new f9 hard drive (before the present one finally gives up). I have no problems about that.
But while I was at it I thought I would buy another hard drive and try a dual boot with on one of my other vista machines as well..

My question is will this be ok or rather will this work ?

My preferred course of install would be:

1. I intend to install the F9 on the new hard drive in the vista box making this new drive the first boot drive in bios.
2. I will install grub on to the mbr on this new drive.
3. I will leave the mbr on the old vista hard drive alone.
4. When I did this with xp I know I just had to map the drives in grub.conf under chainloader section.

This vista box is one that I now use for my video capture and editing ( this is the weak area in fedora with my hardware). But I would like to set up a testing fedora machine and as this box is not really used that much would be the ideal candidate.
However being over careful ( the vista took a considerable time to set up with all sorts of patches and get running I just do not want to mess with it.) I have just been googling around while I am waiting my new F9x86_64 iso to download, and have seen a lot of pages that indicate problems may exist as vista boot loader has been changed? I just cannot find a clear thread anywhere that would cover how I would like to do my set up.. Though that may be because I am not asking the right question as usual.

[bob]

This may help: http://www.jplawrence.us/mywiki/DualBootLinux

[Anniedog]

Originally Posted by bob

This may help: http://www.jplawrence.us/mywiki/DualBootLinux

Thanks bob, but that links to xp and i have that sorted ok. I can handle the xp dual boot (I have done it enough on the amd box).

What I am looking for is a clear vista version of the above link, Actually the link is almost exactly what I intend, it is just I wish to find out if F9 grub has isssues with vista as would seem to exist on my google searches. I know I will approach it using the method above anyway. Just hoping that someone on the forum can confirm that it will work the same for vista as it does for xp. I will probably go for it anyway, just a bit paranoid about that blister box.

BTW The first time I have seen my download rate holding at over 700k/bs using azureus. I am redoing both x86_64 and i386 F9 iso's . My old disks got lost/thrown out , been having some issues with my burner recently and had a pile of coasters, I think my originals went out with them. Just goes to show F9 has been behaving as I hadnt needed the disks since the install.

[Anniedog]

Ok I could not wait so as normal I thought I would go for it. I did not use the same procedure as the link above as I did not swap out the vista drive for the F9 install.

This is what I did:
Install machine Intel Duo 6300, As Rock ESata motherboard.

1. Entered Bios (F2) after installing Hard Drive to second sata port port 1. (The Vista drive on sata port 0) and set bios to boot from the new drive.
2. While in bios I inserted the x86_64 DVD.
3. Saved changes and restarted.
4. Went through the splash screens. An drive initailisation dialog came up for the new drive sdb and selected ok. ( After actually saying no until I came to the partition splash screen and could verify that vista was on sda. This actually meant me doing a restart to go through the install routine properly)
5. I did not choose the default route for partioning the hard drive but selected custom install, setting up my /boot /swap and / partitions on the new drive sdb. Carefully making sure that only this drive(sdb) could be formatted for each option.
6. After this stage it comes to a boot loader options page. I selected first boot drive options and changed this to the new sdb drive. Then I checked the option to install to mbr on sdb. This screen defaulted to mbr on sda without this.
7. Next I set up everything as a normal install would go and then restarted.
8. The grub screen came up and although I had to be quick. Got to edit the time out in /boot/grub/grub.conf.

So it seems that grub can see vista ok and providing careful on the right drive for grub to install on. There is no problems. Just now got to set everything up after I get the updates done. The actual install took only a few minutes on this Intel Duo box. In fact it looks as if the updating is going to take longer than the actual install.

[stoat]

Originally Posted by Anniedog

So it seems that grub can see vista ok and providing careful on the right drive for grub to install on. There is no problems.

Hello Anniedog,

Good. Vista is well-known here to be bootable by GRUB in same old way it boots XP with the chainloader command. Your experience confirmed it, and your documentation of it added to the record.

Vista basically still boots just like MS systems always have booted...

BIOS --> MBR boot code --> Boot sector code --> system files --> kernel

MS boot code in an MBR examines the partition table to find the active partition and then loads into memory and executes the active partition's boot sector code. That results in a system file (e.g., ntldr, bootmgr) being loaded and executed. That leads eventually to the kernel being loaded and executed.

Since the GRUB menu command chainloader +1 loads and executes the boot sector code of the specified partition, it boots Vista just like it booted XP. What's different with Vista is how it stores data for and configures its boot loader. But all of that only matters after the boot sector code is run. Therefore, the same old way of booting MS systems with GRUB still works with Vista.

The Vista boot loader storage and configuration system is called Boot Configuration Data (BCD) and the new boot editing tool for it is called BCDEdit (BCDEdit.exe). The well-known and simple text configuration file boot.ini is gone from Vista. There is also a new repair tool for it called Bootrec.exe. It does the same old things that XP's Recovery Console did (fixmbr and fixboot).

The new thing with Vista that does affect us is configuring Vista to boot Fedora. That requires new and very different steps or third-party software such as EasyBCD.

[Anniedog]

Originally Posted by stoat

Hello Anniedog

The new thing with Vista that does affect us is configuring Vista to boot Fedora. That requires new and very different steps or third-party software such as EasyBCD.

Hi Stoat

I think that is why I was seeing the google pages. Anyway It all works well so I can confirm that using seperate sata drives to dual with vista is fine.

I really think the difficult part is the grub install section on the install routine with F9. If you are not very careful mistakes could easily be made. It is very important that you make sure the drives are in the right place or at least you are certain of which drive has vista on it. I think this would be essential for the default partition install option.
For reference with sata drives:
port0 will equate to hard drive sda
port1 will equate to hard drive sdb
etc
The actual boot order must be set in bios,
Eg how is set up
1st boot cd/dvd
2nd boot sdb(F9)
3rd boot sda(vista)
To do this on my bios I had to select hard drives option and change the order there as well. Just using the boot options bios options did not show the new drive at all. But that may be just the way my bios works.
The F9 installer does not read the bios settings at all when it comes to boot order, and you must set this manually to match your bios in the install screen first.
I feel actually it would be clearer if this option was above the radio buttons options for install to mbr or first sector to whatever partition. Especially as this resets the values of the radio buttons. I do accept that for most cases the install will probably be on the same drive so this would not matter for alot of installs, but it is a confusing screen, if you really have no experience.
Anyway stoat at least with yours and bobs info added this thread may be a little clearer for those that want to dual boot with vista. Well at least I hope so