Dualboot Two Hard Drives

[dksau]

Thank you confused57. That will be my project for tomorrow

[Lovok]

I haven't read too many guides on how to dual boot with two hard drives, but this is how I do it, maybe you guys could tell me if it's dangerous or not :

Enter BIOS
Switch which hard disk the motherboard boots first

If I want to boot Windows, I set that hard drive first. Seems to work fine and is as easy as pie to do.

(This is after I installed Windows and Ubuntu on each hard drive separately.)

[dksau]

I ran into some problems with the preinstalled ubuntu hdd. Next I reinstalled a hdd that had both windows and ubuntu and worked fine as far as booting goes but windows needed to be redone. After reinstalling and before plugging in the new windows only hdd I formatted the windows partition in the old dual boot hdd to ext3 this was bordered by two ext3 partitions. Now with either of the two hdd plugged in alone each will boot and run properly in that respective OS. With ubuntu as master and windows as slave and both hdd plugged in the system doesn't recognize any hdd. What's next

[confused57]

I ran into some problems with the preinstalled ubuntu hdd. Next I reinstalled a hdd that had both windows and ubuntu and worked fine as far as booting goes but windows needed to be redone. After reinstalling and before plugging in the new windows only hdd I formatted the windows partition in the old dual boot hdd to ext3 this was bordered by two ext3 partitions. Now with either of the two hdd plugged in alone each will boot and run properly in that respective OS. With ubuntu as master and windows as slave and both hdd plugged in the system doesn't recognize any hdd. What's next

Does your bios recognize the drives correctly and are you getting a grub boot menu when both drives are connected?

[dksau]

What I get is a message to insert a boot disk. I'm not fully familiar with this new mobo yet. After frying my BIOS this week I went to spare and the BIOS works completely different. I can select a boot disk with f11 but before that hdds are normally displayed during boot up but are not with both hdd plugged into power

[confused57]

What I get is a message to insert a boot disk. I'm not fully familiar with this new mobo yet. After frying my BIOS this week I went to spare and the BIOS works completely different. I can select a boot disk with f11 but before that hdds are normally displayed during boot up but are not with both hdd plugged into power

I'm not that familiar with different bios configurations & tweaks, so I'd suggest starting a new thread in the "Installation & Upgrades" section, describing what you've done, the issues you're having...be sure to give the thread a descriptive title.
There are plenty of knowledgable people on the forum who may be able to help, maybe even someone who's had the same problem.
Good luck.

[dksau]

The actual message I get goes like this. Reboot and Select proper Boot device or Insert Boot Media selected boot device and press a key. When the boot device select menu comes up with both hdd plugged in none are shown in the boot device select menu.

[dksau]

Okay this is how my BIOS looks.


Advanced

IDE Configuration

OnBoard IDE Controler [Enabled]
SATA Operation Mode [RAID]

> Primary IDE Master [Not Detected]
>Primary IDE Slave [Hard Disk]
>Secondary IDE Master [ATAPI CDROM]
>Secondary IDE Slave [Not Detected]
>SATA1 [Not Detected]
>SATA2 [Not Detected]

[dksau]

Well pardon my stupidity. As it turns out my master hdd (Western Digital) requires a different jumper setting for master with slave present and so now I have that solved as the hdd is recognized in BIOS but now there is a different problem. I get the following message when attempting to boot windows.

Error 13 Invalid or unsupported executable format. Press any key to continue. Which returns me to GRUB menu.

Also my objective is to have windows boot by default.

[confused57]

Well pardon my stupidity. As it turns out my master hdd (Western Digital) requires a different jumper setting for master with slave present and so now I have that solved as the hdd is recognized in BIOS but now there is a different problem. I get the following message when attempting to boot windows.

Error 13 Invalid or unsupported executable format. Press any key to continue. Which returns me to GRUB menu.

Also my objective is to have windows boot by default.

Glad you were able to get Ubuntu to boot...to see what the problem may be, please post the output of:

sudo fdisk -l

-l is a lowercase "L"
and

gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst