[Leaplist] Success!! Debian Testing/XP multiboot on 2 HD's

[Whit Hansell]

I wanted to stick this on the LUG for lurking noobs and whoever else is 
interested.  I have already posted it on Linux Questions and JaxLug in 
Jax, too.  So here goes.

Hey y'all.

Success! So thought I'd let y'all know how. I have had Debian Testing 
going for months and love it. But now have a need/requirement to use W 
XP to try to make a little money. So I have two boxes but only one new 
and fast enough to use XP so I needed to multiboot on separate drives. 
I've played w. "hotswap" kits and swapped out drives after shutting down 
but they have little fans in them and I am afraid a fan motor might go 
out and I'm left w. a damaged drive so again, multiboot.

Here's how I did it.

AMD Sempron 2800+ 1G Ram, two WD hd's. Debian on 20G XP on 15 G.

Debian Testing originally installed on Cable 1 middle connector w. CD on 
Cable 2. WD allows for no jumper settings if no master/slave situation 
exists. At Debian install that was the case.

XP, set WD jumper to Master and CD to slave and installed on Cable 1 
after disconnecting the Linux drive. So when I installed XP it was the 
only drive hooked up.

After installation and successful reboots I changed hookups.

Debian Testing WD 20G set to Master on Cable 1 middle connector.
W XP WD 15 G set to slave on Cable 1 end connector.

CD set to Master on Cable 2 on middle connector.

Boot up Linux and as SU, go to /boot/grub and use gedit to add: 
"(hd1)[TAB]/dev/hdb" w/o quotes or [TAB] to device.map file. It already 
had "(hd0)[TAB] /dev/hda" listed. No fd0 listed but it works anyway.   
Just for safety sake you might want to cp device.map to device.mapold 
prior to changing it just in case. And do the same w. the next change.

Now we do the menu.lst change. For safety sake make cp to menu.lstold 
before you edit this file.

Using gedit again, at point in file just above where the AUTOMAGIK info 
starts, enter the following:

title         Windows XP
map         (hd0) (hd1)        # tab after map and space between drive 
labels
map         (hd1) (hd0)        # same as above
root (hd1,0)
rootnoverify (hd1,0)
makeactive
chainloader     +1             # tab after chainloader

Make sure there is a space between the map coordinates, (hd0) and (hd1) 
on both map lines. That drove me nuts for a while.

Anyway, save the menu.lst after adding those lines, reboot and see if it 
works for you. It did for me. I have not messed around w. W XP much yet, 
I was so happy and surprised that it came up in the first place but it 
came up and I fooled around and then rebooted to Linux just fine. 
Haven't checked the CD access yet but hopefully it will work fine.

Hope that helps. And have fun. I had looked all over looking for Debian 
multiboot setups w. XP and hoping to find one that worked for Testing 
and found basically nothing Debian distro specific so wanted to get this 
up here if anyone else was looking. Enjoy.