Hi,


I have a system with the following senario.

It has two hd's and two optical drives.

The first hd is a 40 gig pata on prim master.

The second hd is on intel ich5r sata0 and is 300 gigs.

The two optical drives are on the second slaves.

When I installed Ubuntu I made the 40 gig have two partitions, swap approx 1 gig (hda1) and / the rest (hda2)

Then I made 300 gig /home (sda1 is the extended partition) and the /home is (sda5)

I wanted to add windows xp for various reasons for none of which I am proud, nuff said

So instead of shrinking hda and adding it there, I made a slipstream disc with the sata drivers and installed it on sda

Now sda is composed of sda1 which is still the extended partition. And sda5 and now sda6 which is a ntfs partition. But I shrank both hda and sda (making ntfs on both drives, sizes of the are about half of each drive) prior to the install of windows.

So when I installed windows it installed ntldr, config.sys, etc... to the hda ntfs partition and the rest of windows to the ntfs on the sda drive. sda was my target drive but I didn't realize it was logical.

So then I copied these files off the hda drive and pasted them on the sda6 ntfs partition (under the root folder d:\). This of course screwed up the windows boot loader which pointed to the hda partiton, of course grub from the ubuntu install was lost previously to this as well. So I reinstalled grub to the mbr and have it loading ubuntu(which I am using right now) again with the entire contents of xp on sda6. The reason I believe it put ntldr on hda is because this is a primary partition. I am wrong to believe that windows just cannot install on a logical drive but could be loaded with grub now. I should probably mention that I am not sure about the chainloader part of grub.

Oh and that I have expanded / over the ntfs part of hda again.
My questions are:

Can I now load windows with grub off the sata drive?

What would be the syntax of menu.1st for windows?

Can windows be booted off a logical partition if the boot flag is enabled?

Does windows xp have any kind of boot install boundries aside from the sp1 137 gig thing?

Is there anyway of changing the sata drive to primary without erasing it as there is about 100 gigs of stuff on it?

My questions are NOT:

Is this a good, great or ideal way of doing things

Do think I am dumb for doing this?

Should I have put Xp first?

Should have I made sda primary?

ETC...

I apologize for being rude but it really sucks when someone answers a post with wow you should have done it like this or why did you do that.

Thanks

Short answer (to all) - NO.

M$oft bootloaders require a primary partition.
Grub needs the boot sector record from that partition to chainload.
Boot flag is not used by any Linux loader.
Partitions can't be directly changed from logical to primary or vice versa. Copy the data.

I know that you said this might be rude, but I really think you are making this WAY too complicated.

Here is an alternate solution:
On the 40GB drive, shrink the Ubuntu partition down to maybe 10GB
Make a new (primary) Windows partition of maybe 12 GB
Leave the rest of the disk unpartitioned (for future changes)

Make one or more DATA partitions on the SATA drive. These can be mounted into the Linux or Windows filesystem.

Anytime you install Windows AFTER Linux, you have to re-install GRUB. You can do this with the Ubuntu install disk---or you can put GRUB on a floppy, use that to boot back into Ubuntu, and then re-install GRUB from there.