On Tue, 2008-07-08 at 11:51 +0100, James Freer wrote:
I've read a post on this on another forum and somehow it doesn't seem to work for me... ubuntu 8.04 seems quite clever. It finds the winblows drive and puts the necessary code at the bottom of the menu.lst file. I'd rather use dualboot with two drives as it is then easier for installing new ubuntu releases (IMHO).
hard drives both standard IDE on a 2.6ghz desktop. master drive - ubuntu 8.04 slave drive - win2k (no reason other than i don't have a copy of XP... my only reason for wanting to do dualbooting is that i've got several apps and a scanner than i can't run on ubuntu)
Following the beginning of the guide that worked fine - installing win2k on master and then connecting the master for ubuntu carefully switching the win2k disk to slave.
The problem with doing that is that it would break the Windows bootloader. At this level it identifies the disks depending on where they are on the controller (i.e which channel and master/slave) and partition number on the disk. The error you are getting is because ntldr is getting pointed in the wrong direction by a file in the root of the Windows partition called boot.ini (it is also possible that this file doesn't actually exist, but more on that later).
It is possible you just need to edit the path to the Windows disk in boot.ini unfortunately this is specified as an ARC path (yes that is the Advanced Risc Computing one) so you probably need to read and understand http://support.microsoft.com/kb/102873 first to work out what the ARC path of your disk is now you have moved it. Although if it is the first partition of a secondary disk on the primary IDE channel then multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1) might be close.
That may fix it..or may only get you as far as a BSoD telling you "inaccessible boot device" this really depends on how many goats you have sacrificed.
XP can boot without a boot.ini file ISTR in which case it just tries the first fat32/ntfs partition it can find. But I am pretty sure W2K needs one so editing this (taking a backup copy first) is probably your best chance.