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View Full Version : [ubuntu] dual boot hardy & XP problem



alicemoon
April 30th, 2008, 10:06 PM
I have 2 sata drives running XP on one and loaded hardy on the other. Initialy Hardy loads fine (a few issues to sort out but essentialy ok)and I can choose to use hardy or XP without problems from the menu as long as I have the drive hardy is on as the first boot But if I swop and make the drive XP is on the primary drive then windows starts to load gets halfway through loading programs and crashes. If I then swop back to the ubuntu drive hardy loads ok but xp continues to crash until I disconnect the hardy drive. I have tried this with 2 different sata drives that I loaded hardy onto and the same thing happens with both.
Can anyone explain why?
I know I could just leave the primary as the ubuntu drive and never swop but I am worried it might not be stable and my xp will crash down the line. I want to make the swop to ubuntu but still need to run xp for a couple of programs until I can make the final leap.
Any help and explanations appreciated as I have no idea why this is happening.

Pumalite
April 30th, 2008, 10:10 PM
Was XP installed first in first drive?. How did you install?

alicemoon
April 30th, 2008, 10:28 PM
XP was already installed - I did not want any problems overwriting the drive so I changed the xp drive to secondary in the bios and the empty sata drive became primary, rebooted and installed ubuntu from the cd onto the empty drive

Pumalite
April 30th, 2008, 10:38 PM
That's your problem. You should have installed with XP connected as first drive and let Grub install to MBR.
Post:
sudo fdisk -l
cat /boot/grub/menu.lst

alicemoon
April 30th, 2008, 10:44 PM
thanks - I will have a go installing that way round and see what happens.

Pumalite
April 30th, 2008, 11:13 PM
Good luck.