[NTLUG:Discuss] adding 2nd hard disk

[Chris Cox]

Christopher Thompson wrote:
> im adding a second hard disk for a windows disk (this is an old 20 gig
> that has win xp home on it) i have the disk jumpered to be a slave drive
> and the main drive (500 gig) jumpered to be the master but when i hook
> power to both drives the system boots windows instead of grub. now i
> understand i have to add the lines into grub to boot windows from the
> boot loader but shouldnt it be going into linux instead of windows if
> the linux drive is the "master" drive? or am i missing something?

If the /boot partition on the 500GB drive is marked bootable then
it should boot if it is the master.  Do some checking to make sure
you really have your master/slave right and that the boot
partition is marked as bootable.

Depending on how you did things, it's possible that a Windows
boot record was written to your MBR on the 500G drive.

You can boot into rescue mode from a rescue Linux CD and chroot
to your real root, mount /proc and /sys and do a grub-install.

But there are lots of variables, and unless you know exactly
what you're dealing with you might not want to take a random
stab at solving the problem just quite yet.  So poke around
a bit and see what you can determine first.