On Tue, 31 Oct 2006 16:58:41 -0800, Andrew wrote:

> I made the jump to linux this weekend, and installed Ubuntu Edgy Eft on
> my primary SATA drive (sda1). Everything is working well, but the
> Wine/ATI issue prevented me from running World of Warcraft for long, so
> I installed a second HD (sdb1) and tried to install windows. XP
> wouldn't install because the primary drive was unrecognizable, so I
> removed the linux drives power and installed windows. Now both work
> correctly, but the computer boots straight to XP. If I tell the bios
> during bootup to pick sda1 instead of just booting off the hard drives
> I get grub and can get into Ubuntu. How do I fix this so I get a
> bootloader (I don't care if its windows or grub), and can default into
> Ubuntu?

Personally, I think you're confused about a few things, so starting at the
basics;

You have two hard drives, sda, and sdb. If each drive has a single
partition, the partitions will be sda1, and sdb1. Windows will happily
install to a single primary partition, as it uses a swap file for memory
swapping. Linux can do that too, but it is more common to have a swap
partition in addition to the / partition. The swap partition can be either
before, or after, the / partition. It helps to know the actual layout of
your disks. From a Ubuntu terminal, the command "sudo fdisk -l" (lower
case L) without the quotes, will show all the disk partitions.

Grub normally installs in the MBR, by default, but it is possible to
install it on any partition, if your plan is to chain-load from another
boot loader. This is not the usual case with someone new to Linux, so
until instructed otherwise, I'll assume that grub is actually installed in
the MBR of sda. With Windows on sdb1, and with the BIOS set to boot from
sda, you say you can boot Ubuntu, so do that.

As root, edit your /boot/grub/menu.lst, by adding the following;

title Windows
rootnoverify (hd1,0)
map (hd0) (hd1)
map (hd1) (hd0)
makeactive
chainloader +1

This should give you a choice, in your grub start-up menu, between Ubuntu
and Windows. Most likely, there is already an entry at the top of your
menu.lst setting the default to Ubuntu, in the following form;

default 0
timeout 15

The above sets the default to the first entry that starts with "title",
and boots that entry after 15 seconds, if another selection is not made.
It is common to have more than one entry for each Linux installation with
titles like failsafe, or nofb, so if you wanted to set Windows as the
default, and it was the fourth entry, you would set the default to 3.
(grub always counts from 0)

If the above does not work, come back and tell us what the actual results
were.

--
imotgm
"Lost? Lost? I've never been lost... Been a tad confused for a
month or two, but never lost."