2HD's, no bios control; your option!?

[Justs0me]

Hello all,
I'm asking for advice or preferences/options in that i will be obtaining a laptop (dv9000z) with 2 100GB SATA HD's that is pre-installed with vista ; well im somewhat of a gamer and would like a more efficient windows OS (when i unfortunately have to use one, though still want to play around with vista for a little bit) and would like to put XP on the same HD as vista while i put linux distros on the 2nd HD. The problem is what ive seen so far is that the BIOS is not able to choose which HD i boot off of first. so would it be better to put fedora on the primary HD so the bios boots linux grubs; since by jims guide: (http://jimlawrnc.mine.nu/mywiki/DualBootLinux) putting the grub on the primary HD with windows, it will not see the grub for some reason); because i dont really want to go through windows boot manager to get to linux. also if i do this and i get dumb (user error) and some how mess up the primary HD's MRB or linux all together will the bios then go to the slave? HD (where i will have to have a windows boot manager set up properly in this case?)? sorry for dumb questions just never had 2HD's before or dual booted before a fedora 6 install. corrections and other idea's are very welcome!

[leadgolem]

I'm not sure about vista, but with an xp disk you can boot to the recovery console and fix your mbr. There is no real reason to have fedora, or another linux distro, on the primary HD. You can put grub in the primary HD's mbr then use it to boot whatever you want. Of course it is somewhat more complex then that to setup, but once done I don't think you will have any problems.

One bit of advice, I would suggest getting grub setup on the mbr of the primary HD. Then set that grub to chainload another distro specific grub on the first part of each /boot partition. That way you won't have to go through the pain of manually changing the grub settings if you install multiple linux distros and update the kernels.

[Justs0me]

Thanks leadgolem, the reason why i asked the dumb questions about HD stuff is that i read this thread (http://forums.fedoraforum.org/forum/...ghlight=dv9000)

and specifically the post by Steve:
(Hello:
You may want to have a look here :
http://jimlawrnc.mine.nu/mywiki/DualBootLinux
If you have separate hd's for win and fc then try and switch the boot order of the hd's in your BIOS. If grub appears then you should be good to go.
If grub is installed on the fc drive then as long as you can boot from that drive you should have no problem, just follow Jim's guide.

Seve)


and when the llink to jims guide did work i believe he was putting the GRUB on the primaray HD with linux on slave and it would only boot to windows, he had to unplug the primary HD when installing Fedora or somthing.