Windows on the Second Hard Drive (Linux on the First)
I had the occasion to rebuild my workstation recently (see my post four days ago for my excuse).
"I'll do something different this time. I'll put Windows on the second hard drive," I said. I've never done that before.
A casual Google search on "Windows on the second hard drive" turned up a bunch of pages talking about how to add a second hard drive to a Windows system.
(I should have taken the hint.)
Stuck the W2K CD in. Boot to CD. "Delete the old partitions and lose all data?" Sure!
"Where do you want to install Windows?" I selected the second hard drive.
"Even though you want to install Windows on the second hard drive, we have to put some startup files on the first hard drive. Do you want me to do that?" Saying no drops me right back to the previous screen.
(I should have taken the hint.)
Finally I gave in. Created a small partition on the first hard drive and proceeded to install Windows. Smooth install. Reboot to complete the install. Install the stuff from the MB CD, reboot. Sound driver, reboot. Video driver, reboot. Scanner driver, reboot. Printer driver, reboot. Office, reboot. Dozens of other software, dozens of reboots.
Now, it's Linux's turn. Stuck the Fedora Core 1 CD in. Boot to CD. Zapped that Windows partition on the first hard drive. "It was just some files to get the W2K installation started, right? Now the W2K installation is done, it can be safely deleted," thought I.
(What was I thinking?)
Created a whole bunch of partitions on the first hard drive and installed Linux. Linux also installed smoothly, discovering all my hardware along the way, except the scanner. No reboots required.
It saw the W2K installation on the second hard drive and offered a dual boot setup, with GRUB as the bootloader.
Come time to reboot to W2K, it wouldn't. GRUB printed
rootnoverify (hd1, 0) chainloader +1
and hung.
(I should have known better than to delete that W2K partition on the first drive! But now it's too late.)
Stuck in W2K CD again and booted to the Recovery Console. Saw the content of my W2K installation, all right there in the C:\ drive. Ran a couple of commands: FIXBOOT C: and FIXMBR C:. No luck.
Did an info grub to find out that GRUB has to trick W2K into thinking that the second hard drive it is installed on is the first hard drive. So I modified /boot/grub/menu.lst so that it reads, in part:
title Windows 2000
rootnoverify (hd1,0)
map (hd0) (hd1)
map (hd1) (hd0)
chainloader +1
Progress! Now it boots past GRUB into W2K-land and complained about could not find NTLDR
I went back to the W2K Recovery Console, and looked at the content of the root C:\ directory. Sure enough, NTLDR was not there, along with four other files (MTDETECT.COM, arcldr.exe, arcsetup.exe, boot.ini).
I copied them over from another known good W2K installation. And this time it worked.
It still says something like "Your BOOT.INI file is wrong. Booting from C:\WINNT", which suits me just fine.