WIP Dual Boot modification

[broiyan]

MacJunky, Yours is an interesting suggestion. Let me get this straight. You say that I can boot to USB flash drive by specifying so in BIOS. The bootable drive on the USB flash drive implements a what you call a "bootloader" and from there I can select whether to boot my Windows hard disk or my Linux hard disk. I would have to have both hard disks wired to power and both wired with SATA data cables and yet the presence of the disk not selected will not interfere with the one that has been selected. If I pick Windows it will appear as my C drive. If I pick linux it will appear as a normal linux mounted disk.

There is only the following waste: the fact that two disks are using power when in fact only one is being used.

Is all this correct?

[MacJunky]

That is not actually much extra power used.. unless you are running your house off-grid.. but in that case you use a notebook instead of a desktop anyway(and notebook drives consume less power as well). :P

Booting - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Comparison of boot loaders - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I should point out that when using windows, your linux drive will not appear at all since windows cannot read or write to EXT2 or EXT3. I cannot recall the state of support in linux for NTFS filesystems.. but it is likely it will at least show up.



*Edit
But you know what? Your motherboard's BIOS offers boot device selection anyway. It sounds like you do not really know what you are doing with this stuff so I am very tempted to just say that you should leave both discs alone(but connected), not bother with a flash drive and use the selector provided by the mobo instead of trying to setup anything...

[gingerbee]

you could leave both plugged in and just change the boot order in the bios. seems to me your making this way harder then it is no?

[Rasparthe]

I think his original idea was to have a physical switch you move in order to employ one drive or the other, some sort of toggle. I think what he is looking for is simply moving this toggle and pushing the power to start up the computer with the correct OS without getting into the BIOS and switching boot priority which is easily missed. Unless there is a way to set your MOBO to enter BIOS each and every time it boots the bootloader might be the easiest way to accomplish this. I have no experience with them but am interested as I would like to set up a drive that has a stripped down OS for benching and OC apps that I can switch back and forth from to my main everyday drives.

[enaberif]

What he wants is to be able to shut down the power to the drive that is not being used.

Why I do not know? Hard drives do not use much power regardless and on top of that did you perhaps think that by allowing both drives to be functional and operational that you could pull files from your Windows share across to your linux drive and vice versa?

Your though process is not logical in any means; sorry.

[ZZLEE]

In my Bios I just have to hit "escape" early on in boot to select a boot device other than the set up in bios.

Right now I have WIN RC and WIN 7 64
Sees boath drives but only boots from one.

[ilya]

@Macjunky: Linux has no issues writing to/reading from foreign file systems, NTFS included. It's open source so it simply doesn't care. Kind of like VLC media player not caring about the codec a particular file uses, it just plays the file.

To all those who suggested using the BIOS to change the boot device, I would have to disagree, since that wouldn't remove the Windows MBR from the equation. The Windows MBR/bootrec.exe is extremely picky, especially on XP/Vista, not as bad on 7 though. You'll run into too many issues with Windows not wanting a foreign OS on the same system. (heck, you can even run into problems if you don't install 7 on top of XP properly) The easiest way to dual boot Ubuntu/Windows 7 is to install Windows 7, then install Ubuntu. Make sure you overwrite the Windows MBR with GRUB, this is the most important part, as GRUB doesn't care about having Windows/Linux on the same PC. Then just pick your OS from the GRUB bootloader on every boot, you can also set it to load your main OS automatically after a certain period of time.

[Behemoth-]

I dont get it... why dont you just install Grub..? It will prompt you to choose which O/S you want to boot from..

[MacJunky]

Originally Posted by ilya

To all those who suggested using the BIOS to change the boot device, I would have to disagree, since that wouldn't remove the Windows MBR from the equation. The Windows MBR/bootrec.exe is extremely picky, especially on XP/Vista, not as bad on 7 though. You'll run into too many issues with Windows not wanting a foreign OS on the same system. (heck, you can even run into problems if you don't install 7 on top of XP properly) The easiest way to dual boot Ubuntu/Windows 7 is to install Windows 7, then install Ubuntu. Make sure you overwrite the Windows MBR with GRUB, this is the most important part, as GRUB doesn't care about having Windows/Linux on the same PC. Then just pick your OS from the GRUB bootloader on every boot, you can also set it to load your main OS automatically after a certain period of time.

As long as the installs to the drives are completely independent the default bootloaders do not really care.(just so long as you do not accidentally overwrite one)
He has two physical drives that were(it sounds like) isolated from each other during install so neither drive's bootloader has entries for the OS on the other drive in it. He *should* be ok.

[enaberif]

Originally Posted by ilya

@Macjunky: Linux has no issues writing to/reading from foreign file systems, NTFS included. It's open source so it simply doesn't care. Kind of like VLC media player not caring about the codec a particular file uses, it just plays the file.

Actually writing to a NTFS file system linux is still considered at your risk only and hasn't been perfected. You can do it.. but just be wary that something COULD happen.