dual boot advice

[Tony Alfrey]

Man-wai Chang wrote:
>> Currently I have an IDE port for the Windows drive and a SATA controller
>> for the linux drives, but most new motherboards have only SATA ports.
>> There is considerable confusion on the web about installing XP on SATA
>> drives, some talk about needing a floppy w/ the SATA driver, some talk
>> about disabling AHCI in BIOS before loading XP.
> 
> For simplicity's sake, set the SATA mode in BIOS to IDE first, then 
> install both OSs. I suggest you install WinXP first, then SuSE. AHCI was 
> not available when WinXP came out. I think WinXP SP3 got it, not too sure.
> 
> After that, you could enable AHCI support in WinXP, install necessary 
> drivers, then set the SATA mode in BIOS to AHCI. There should be no need 
> to install AHCI module for Linux (for recent kernels).
> 
> Should you made a mistake and failed to boot XP, don't panic, just set 
> the SATA mode back to IDE and it should be fine.
> 
> A better way to install WinXP with AHCI enabled is to use nLite to 
> slip-stream all necessary drivers, service packs, and updates with your 
> WinXP CDROM to build a new ISO. Then you can set SATA mode to AHCI and 
> install WinXP from the specially made ISO directly.
> 
> Anyway, since you maybe formatting some partitions to install the two 
> OSs, you better back up your data first.
> 
> Have fun!
> 



Thanks for the somewhat delayed reply
;-)

Some of this isn't quite clear to me but certainly the slip-streaming 
part I've seen mentioned on line before.
It turns out that my motivation for doing all of this had to do with 
what I thought was some sort of major failure in my box;  it would hang 
up randomly when trying to boot one of the SATA drives.  It gave me all 
kinds of ATA port error messages and then it would get stuck.

It turns out that when fussing with BIOS, I happened to click on a 
selection in BIOS called something like "system health".  In this 
window, there was a section that showed the various voltages out of the 
power supply;  a +5 volt line only showed something like 4.20 volts. 
This fact, along with the fact that I discovered that the box would boot 
with any /two/ drives, but not with /three/, led me to believe that the 
silly box just needed a new power supply.

So now the old box is back on line and I can be more methodical about 
setting up a new box and not be in a panic
;-)



-- 
Tony Alfrey
tonyalfrey at earthlink.net
"I'd Rather Be Sailing"