RE: [ros-general] Installing ReactOS on a second hard drive.

[Brian Palmer]

FYI - FreeLoader also supports remapping the drives.

-Brian

-----Original Message-----
From: ros-general-bounces(a)reactos.org
[mailto:[e-mail]] On Behalf Of Ralph Shumaker
Sent: Friday, November 11, 2005 3:35 AM
To: ReactOS General List
Subject: Re: [ros-general] Installing ReactOS on a second hard drive.

Redefined Horizons wrote:

>   I'd like to get ReactOS up and running on my
> Debian Linux box, so I 
>  can try it out. I would like to install it on a second hard drive, and 
>  boot to it using Grub, which I already use with Debian. I'm not sure 
>  how to do this. Can I choose which hard drive I install ReactOS to 
>  when I am installing from the ReactOS CD? If not, how do I install to 
>  the slave drive and not the master? Will installing to the slave drive 
>  cause me problems with Grub? Will I need to do some configuring of 
>  Grub to get ReacOS to boot from the second hard drive? 

Well, I'm not sure if it will fool ReactOS, but this will fool Windows 
95 and 98.  In Grub, swap the first two drives.  You would have to set 
up a Grub menu item that uses "map hd0,hd1" and then "map hd1,hd0". 
But 
then you would have to tell grub to then proceed to boot from the 
ReactOS installation CD, and that part I cannot help you with.  The map 
command just swaps them for that boot only.  If you reboot, the mapping 
reverts unless you choose that menu item again.  I guess, as an 
alternative, you can set up a grub menu item to "hide hd0,0", "hide 
hd0,1", and however many more partitions you have on hd0.  Choose this 
item just once and all those partitions will be hidden from grub and 
windows, and maybe even ReactOS.  What the "hide" command does is 
persistent, meaning that it will survive a reboot because it actually 
changes the partition id of the partition being hidden to an id that 
identifies it as being hidden.  If you do this, set up another menu item 
to "unhide hd0,0", and all the others.  This menu item to unhide may not 
work if grubs boot partition gets hidden from itself so have a Debian 
boot disk (or Knoppix CD (Knoppix ROCKS!!!  Yeah!!!)) standing by, just 
in case.  In this event, you may need to use fdisk to change the 
partition id back to the current id (probably hexadecimal 82 or 83, I 
cannot recall which one is swap and which one is the normal Linux 
ext2/ext3 id).  If ReactOS decides to over write your grub boot loader, 
you may want to prepare by using dd to copy the harddrive's boot sectors 
and partition tables to another location so you can just copy them back 
in the worst case.  I'm no expert in any of this.  I'm just somewhat 
aware of it.  You'll have to ask someone else if you need specifics, or 
dig them up for yourself.  I doubt that I would be able to help you if 
you need anything more than clarification on something I may not have 
been clear on.  In any case, it is always good to experiment with 
backups that are *known* to be good.  If you have a spare hard drive of 
the same size or greater, just use dd to copy the entire hard drive.  
"dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb" will work on red hat though I think it will 
be the same for debian.  That command should copy every last detail of 
hda onto hdb including the boot sectors and partition tables, sector by 
sector.  If you use Knoppix to do it, then you can rest assured that 
there will be no file locks on hda, nor any files changing on hda after 
the sectors have been copied.


>    
>  I'm just looking for the basic procedure I need to follow. I can do 
>  some digging on the net for the ugly details. I'm not sure where to 
>  start with this, or if it will even work. 

I hope this gives you a leg up.


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