[LBo] Setup grub to boot off external harddisk

[Randy Kramer]

Bert,

Thanks very much for setting me straight--I guess I was right--"those memories 
and experiences are pretty fuzzy at this point in time" ;-)

regards,
Randy Kramer

On Monday 03 September 2007 06:32 am, Bert Van Kets wrote:
> There are two different thing at play here. First of all you need to set 
> the bootable drives in your BIOS. If you don't set it right there, you 
> will never be able to boot from a secondary or an external drive. You 
> will have to have the system boot from the primary drive and have the 
> bootloader point to the external drive/partition.
>
> Once you get the BIOS set right, you need to set the active partition on 
> the boot disk. The active partition will be used to boot from. You can 
> boot from any primary partition as long as its acive. Even when the 
> first primary partition is a Linux partition and the Windows partition 
> is the second, you can boot from the second primary partition by setting 
> that second partition to active. Use fdisk or a similar tool to set the 
> active partition.
> 
> Also, you can have any primary or logical drive (in an extended 
> partition) be accessed by Windows. Windows will simply list the 
> partitions it can read (basically FAT, FAT32 and NTFS formatted 
> partitions). Even an NTFS formatted logical drive in an extended 
> partition at the end of your drive will be listed.
>
> Here's a setup I did on my son's computer not long ago.
> - Primary partition of 10GB with WinXP
> - Primary partition of 100MB formatted ext3 (linux boot)
> - Extended partition
>     * logical drive of 1GB (linux swap)
>     * logical drive of 30GB formatted as ext3 (linux root)
>     * logical drive of 40GB formatted as NTFS (D-drive in Windows and 
> /data in Linux)
> 
> I installed WindowsXP first and then added Fedora 7, leaving the space 
> for a data partition free. Grub detected WindowsXP fine during install. 
> I just had to change the name of the OS listed. I then proceeded to 
> install NTFS support in Linux and added the NTFS partition, mounting it 
> as /data. The only thing left to do then is use the Drive Manager in 
> Windows to set the drive letter of the data partition to D:.
> 
> This setup allows my son to switch between Windows and Linux and still 
> have all his data available in both OSes.