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Can you install to the 2nd drive and boot?
Posted: Thu Apr 24, 2008 12:08 pm
by dwilsonfl
I've played with Linux - specifically Ubuntu - off and on but not on my T40. Now that I've received my Ultrabay and have an extra 40gig sitting in it, I'm wondering if I could download the latest Ubuntu, install it on there, and dual boot to either XP or Linux????
Or just have the option at startup to boot to that while it was installed???
Thanks for your help,
David
Posted: Thu Apr 24, 2008 4:54 pm
by GomJabbar
You can install a separate OS to each hard drive independantly. Press F12 at the beginning of the boot sequence to choose which hard drive to boot. This is assuming you are using the 2nd hard drive UltraBay Slim adapter (for the T40 and some other ThinkPads) for this setup. I am not certain if you can boot other external drives or not. Some USB drives may be bootable.
You can also install a boot manager (such as GRUB) on your primary hard drive and choose which OS to boot from there.
Note that if you install an OS on the C: drive, and if that drive becomes a D: drive, that OS will not boot and may become corrupted. Same thing vice-versa. This can be a problem if you try to add an already installed OS to a boot manager when using 2 hard drives. Been there, done that. If you install the OS on the second hard drive with the primary hard drive in it's slot, then using a boot manager should work fine.
When you use F12 to choose the drive to boot; the booting drive will be the C: drive or Primary drive (whether in the main hard drive slot or UltraBay Slim slot), and the drive that is not being booted becomes the D: drive.
I currently have WIndows XP and Mandriva Linux on my primary hard drive, and use GRUB to choose which of these to boot. I have Vista Ultimate on my second hard drive and use F12 to boot that drive. This is on a ThinkPad T42.
One final note: if you install Vista while you have another version of Windows (or possibly another OS) on the system, Vista will install it's boot manager whether you want it or not. If you install Vista on a drive by itself, with no other OS present during installation, then you won't need to worry about the boot manager possibly becoming a nuisance. In some cases though, using Vista's boot manager might be desirable (as long as you don't plan on removing any OS's later).
I hope I made this understandable...