Dualboot with IDE and SATA drives

[Guest]

Hi everybody!

I had XP and Kubuntu installed on my old PC (2 IDE hard disks) and it worked great! A few days ago i bought a new one and tried to do the same. The big important difference I think is that I have two IDE HDs and one SATA HD now.
I installed the 64-bit version of XP and Kubuntu 64-bit afterwards. My Problem is, that when I boot my PC GRUB doesn't show up and XP is booted without a choice between XP and Kubuntu!

These are my PC data:

Mainboard: ASUS P5K P35 S775, 1394, Raid, GBL
CPU: Intel E8400 Core2 Duo 3.00 GHz 6 MB Box FSB1333
Arbeitsspeicher: DDR2 2GB
Grafikkarte: PCI-E Gaiward 8800 GT 512MB
Festplatten: SATA 320 GB
IDE 160 GB
IDE 40 GB

I installed Kubuntu to the 40 GB HD and XP to the SATA HD. I don't know what I did wrong ...
Can please anybody help!?

Thanks a lot in advance!

Best regards,
Alex

[dibl]

Re: Dualboot with IDE and SATA drives

It's not necessarily that you did something "wrong". There is a complex interaction between the BIOS, the IDE bus, the IDE drive jumpers, the SATA bus, the Linux installer, and Grub, regarding hard drive identification and sequencing. On my own system, for example, even though I have set the IDE drive to be last in the BIOS hard drive sequence, the installer on the Kubuntu installation CD will identify it as (hd0) and write Grub to it, no matter what I do, except if I disconnect the IDE drive from the bus.

So, something like this is probably happening to you.

Without knowing your BIOS setup, I would recommend that you make at least 2 partitions on your large IDE drive and set that one to be first (master) and the smaller IDE drive to be second (slave). The SATA drive will probably be third, as far as Linux is concerned, no matter what you do. :P

Then install XP on the large IDE drive in the first partition, and Kubuntu in the second partition, and let the installer write Grub to the MBR of that drive. Use the other drives for data storage, and swap if you wish.

HTH