[ale] Booting a Win XP drive with grub without reinstalling?

[Jonathan Glass]

> Guys,
>
> I have two machines...one with Windows XP and one with Red Hat 8.  I'd
> like to take the harddrive out of the XP machine and drop it in the RH8
> box as an IDE slave, and then use grub to dual boot.
>
> The grub tutorials I've seen so far assume you've either got XP installed
> and are doing a new Linux install or doing a new install of both.
>
> Is it possible to do it as I've described?  Anyone else done this?
>
> Thanks as always for the help.
>
> John

Check out 'info grub';
File: grub.info,  Node: General boot methods,  Next: OS-specific notes, 
Up: Bo\
oting

How to boot operating systems
=============================

   GRUB has two distinct boot methods. One of the two is to load an
operating system directly, and the other is to chain-load another boot
loader which then will load an operating system actually. Generally
speaking, the former is desirable, because you don't need to install or
maintain other boot loaders and GRUB is flexible enough to load an
operating system from an arbitrary disk/partition. However, the latter
is sometimes required, since GRUB doesn't support all the existing
operating systems natively.

* Menu:

* Loading an operating system directly::
* Chain-loading::

DOS/Windows
-----------

   GRUB cannot boot DOS or Windows directly, so you must chain-load them
(*note Chain-loading::). However, their boot loaders have some critical
deficiencies, so it may not work to just chain-load them. To overcome
the problems, GRUB provides you with two helper functions.

   If you have installed DOS (or Windows) on a non-first hard disk, you
have to use the disk swapping technique, because that OS cannot boot
from any disks but the first one. The workaround used in GRUB is the
command `map' (*note map::), like this:

     grub> map (hd0) (hd1)
     grub> map (hd1) (hd0)

   This performs a "virtual" swap between your first and second hard
drive.

HTH

Jonathan Glass

-- 
Jonathan Glass
Systems Support Specialist II
IBB/GTEC
Office: 404-385-0127
Cell: 404-444-4086