Help with dual booting Fedora and Vista from a Intel ICH9R controller in a Raid0 conf

dpierre

Member
I’ve been using EasyBcd from sometime now with great success with a triple boot; Vista64, XP and Fedora 8 64bit. With this set up I was using the 3ware 9650SE controller card with 4 drives with a 2 drive Raid0, so two separate sets. One to have my Vista 64 and the other for my Linux and XP. Let me back up by saying the reason I bought this controller card is because I could never get the Intel ICH9R controller, which was native on the motherboard, to work with this configuration since linux sees it as a software raid or dmraid, so booting from windows then back to Linux never work for me with Easybcd, the hardware controller card seem to solve all my problem.

Well now I’ve been forced to switch out motherboards and forced to get rid of my 3ware controller card due to lack of PCIe lanes on the board. Thus, once again I am stuck with the ICH9R controller. However this time I am really close to making everything work but need some help with the set up. As before I have two drive with Raid0 for my Vista which I have named “VISTA64” in the Intel ICH9R BIOS. And the other as RAID0 set up as “LINUX” in the ICH9R BIOS. In the motherboard BIOS I am forced to have only one hard drive for booting which is VISTA64 as the default hard drive. The motherboard does see the LINUX drive. However when I install Fedora 8 or 9 it has trouble seeing both Raid sets so I have to unplug the VISTA64 set and just install with only the LINUX set plugged in. That works fine and I can reboot and boot into Fedora, Grub comes up and I’m in. But when I plug back in the two drives (VISTA64) and boot into Vista and use EasyBCD and point it that my boot sector of my LINUX drive it just has a blank screen that says “GRUB” and hangs. It’s like its see’s Grub bootloader but not able to switch or activate the LINUX raid set to boot to. I could be wrong here I just assuming
this is the case.

I’ve been reading about NeoGrub and was think it could solve my problem since its able to activate and deactivate hard drive sets. I read the example in the NeoGrub’s page but it only shows a basic XP and linux setup and not how to select between two separate hard drive sets (in my cause VISTA64 and LINUX sets). I was able to go into my Grub and copy my hard drive info, so I know how to fill that portion out, I just don’t know where ti insert the “makeactive” statement and how it works . I need help getting my menu.lst setup correctly so its able to choose either raid set, if I’m even on the right track. So, Am I on the right track it here with Neogrub? Or should EasyBCD be able to see my LINUX drive and launch from the bootsector eventhough the motherboard BIOS is only able to have one hard drive to boot from (in my case it Vista64)? Thanks in advance.

David
 
Make sure you are on the Linux tab when adding the entry, pointing to the correct partition, and then checking the option for grub is not installed. This in the background well set up a entry automatically for you that uses neogrub to load your linux install.
 
Back
Top