dual boot 2HDs

sorry can you report your question with more detail please?

Ihave 2HDs XP on one Ubuntu on the other When I boot up XP loads by default. If on boot up I press F8 boot up menu appears. I select second HD black screen appears with white text which has four lines of text for ubuntu and one for XP if I just leave it it boots to ubuntu

Ihave 2HDs XP on one Ubuntu on the other When I boot up XP loads by default. If on boot up I press F8 boot up menu appears. I select second HD black screen appears with white text which has four lines of text for ubuntu and one for XP if I just leave it it boots to ubuntu

Richsheil,

I assume you installed Ubuntu on the second HDisk;
the PC starts always from the MasterBootRecord of HDisk-0 (the first one), obviously that disk contains XP AND the startup-utility of XP.

If you want to change it to the "normal way", ie.
PC-on, Grub loads and lets you choose (these 4 lines) between Ubuntu, XP, etc...
then we must get the grub-loader to hd(0) in stead of on hd(1) [=the second]

First my question to you is:
? Is this what you want?
YES , then we will help you with a few commands, that will do that.

It appears that each hard drive contains the OS specific boot-loader installed to the MBR. This is actually good. I prefer this type of configuration, this allow each OS to be as independent as possible.

To get the grub menu to load by default, you will to change your boot order. Please go into you BIOS setting and select your second hdd as your primary boot device. This will give you the grub menu each time you boot.

From this menu try selecting your Windows OS. If it loads fine, you are all set.

If not, you will need to edit you Windows entry in the /boot/grub/menu.lst file. To do this, open a terminal and type

gksu gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst

Then scroll down the bottom and find you window entry. You will have to add the following ¨map¨ commands

### END DEBIAN AUTOMAGIC KERNELS LIST

title *************** Other Operating Systems ***************
root

title Window XP Professional
  rootnoverify (hd1)
  map (hd0) (hd1)
  map (hd1) (hd0)
  chainloader +1

These map commands swap the drives so that windows thinks that it is installed and the primary boot drive.

Hope this helps