Dual boot in a notebook with two HD

If your laptop currently has a 160 gig drive, then there are probably no drive size limits to worry about. (The drive limits that I can think of off the top of my head were at 2 gigs and 127 gigs.)

Your BIOS probably has a feature to let you select your boot device every boot: first hard drive, second hard drive, CDROM, USB CDROM, USB floppy, USB Mass storage, network, etc.. If so, you can keep grub on the second drive, leave the first drive untouched, and use your BIOS to select the different boot device.

If your BIOS doesn't make this easy enough (say, if you have to go into the BIOS Setup to make the change..) then you might want to put a bootloader on the first drive that can chain to either your first OS bootloader, or a bootloader on the second drive. (I've been lucky enough to not need this functionality. :)

Hope this helps

You can configure grub to boot both, the 2nd drive will be the booting drive but if instructed it can start any of the OS on the first drive, or even the 2nd drive.

First of all what is the other os u have installed it can make a big difference on what bootloader you want to use like windows xp use grub windows vista our windows 7 use the windows boot loader becouse it will reconize the systems in an easy loader now if running windows 7 with grub loader you can come into small problems but you can make the loader reconize windows 7 as a windows vista on the grub becouse it sees vista but will not see 7 for some reason even though it uses the same ntfs format i would recomend using grub on all formats but you need to learn the difference between them and make a choice of your own. if you are running some mac os i cant help there sorry mac is just yeah they wish they .. cant say what i want lol

First of all what is the other OS u have installed it can make a big difference on what boot loader you want to use like windows xp use grub windows vista our windows 7 use the windows boot loader because it will recognize the systems in an easy loader now if running windows 7 with grub loader you can come into small problems but you can make the loader recognize windows 7 as a windows vista on the grub because it sees vista but will not see 7 for some reason even though it uses the same ntfs format i would recommend using grub on all formats but you need to learn the difference between them and make a choice of your own. if you are running some mac OS i cant help there sorry mac is just yeah they wish they .. cant say what i want lol.. as far as the hard drive problem the boot loader will detect all the OS systems on both hard drives your,, BIOS has nothing to do with that.. it can load any hard drive you choose first, and as long as the boot loader you chose is on that hard drive it will recognize all disk formats then thats all you need... say you have windows xp on C: and you have Ubuntu on D: if you choose C: as the boot disk then depending on how you installed Linux it will just strait load xp... if you had xp first and then installed Linux on D: then the windows boot loader will recognize both systems, our grub may pick up because usually it over writes your MBR and that is were most people get lost. Your Master Boot Record (MBR) is what determines your loading process. BIOS determines a lot of system settings and loads before the OS but it is the MBR the determines your loading system of OS. be for i keep babbling respond with the systems you want to dual boot and i will tell you the best way to do it..

whoops didnt relize i posted early untel now sory for that i was trying check and add more must have hit the wrong button lol