Deja Vu!!

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I used to use http://www.winimage.com/bootpart.htm to get around some of the problems with multiboot. I'm not sure that it's appropriate for you. It essentially fools every OS to think that it was booted from the MBR.

One problem, these days, with Linux installations, is that they have tried to remove most of the "advanced" options - or at least, they tuck them away where they won't be seen by an average installer. You certainly CAN ensure that grub (or lilo) do not touch the MBR, but merely install themselves in a partition. However, I'm not sure at which point you jump into the Mint install, to achieve that. It's so long since I bothered to do anything other than let grub automatically find every bootable OS on my system.

I thank you. I have read a little about GRUB, and I will look more into its Advanced options. I also plan to look more into NeoSmart's EasyBCD and iReboot: http://neosmart.net/

I am also thinking about just disconnecting my first drive or putting in a raw substitute while installing Mint on drive 2, then re-connecting drive 1 and figuring out how to add the Mint OS to my boot options.

It's not so much the advanced options of grub - just how you get the installer to ask grub not to live on the MBR.

And.. juggling drives around is pretty straightforward, for Linux. It now mounts them according to the UUID recorded in the partitions, so there may be no trouble at all, when you boot up Mint. However, Mint won't then know what's present on the other drive.... as it won't have scanned it, during the install. However, it will probably manage to auto-mount partitions from it, once it boots up.

As it happens, I had three drives on this system... but I moved the one that was "drive a" onto another machine. To cheat, a little, I just have my two remaining drives mount as if they are still "b" and "c". It saved me a tiny bit of hassle.

Ah, more things to consider.

I have to do "hands on" in order to learn effectively anyway, so I think I will just do a practice install or two with just one raw drive connected for now so I can learn my way around a bit. I suspect I will ultimately trust GRUB, but I have already read about multi-boot troubles between Mint and both XP and Win7.

Question: What about putting Mint on a USB stick inside my machine? I have a 3-port PCI card that has one of its ports on the inside, and I have an 8-gig stick I could use. Yesterday, even XP seemed willing to install itself on a stick in another machine I was setting up.

Take a look here when you have a few minutes:

http://neosmart.net/wiki/display/EBCD/Linux

It looks to me like the "Vista before Linux" part should work for me if I just install Mint on its selected partition and let GRUB do nothing more than put it there ... then I come out of there and reboot and use EasyBCD to add Mint as an option in the loader for Win7.

Well, I made it!

The Mint installation went very smoothly, and it was impressive. If this had been a Windows installation, I would just now be getting started on a few hours of updates and patches rather than sitting here typing this right after already completing Mint's updates.

For whatever reason, the Mint installer said there are no other operating systems on this computer, but it had no problem finding all the partitions on both drives. I had to cancel once in order to go read the manual again to find out what kind of format to use on the partition, then I watched closely for "Advanced" and told Mint to only place its boot file on its own partition. After that, EasyBCD did the job of adding Mint into the overall mix ... and I was able to boot right on up wherever I wanted the first time I tried.

Fuzzy, Orwell, Lau, CW and "friend" (who showed me how to get more control over Win7): I thank you!

Oh. Yes. That was the other thing we all forgot to mention. After the After the fairly brief install (20-30 minutes?) - you then have to...


... just use it.

Deja-new!

Welcome to Linux. Congratulations on all the new stuff you are learning.

I'll be looking forward to hearing your thoughts on Linux over the next few weeks.

Congrats and welcome to the Linux world. Let us know if you need any more help, especially in finding Linux equivalents to Windows programs. They're out there for basically everything but the games.

I definitely like the Linux, but I have had one problem. I have a MiniView KVPM switch, and I am accustomed to letting systems boot up in the background while I am doing something else over on a different machine. My switch is supposed to maintain some kind of connectivity signal even when I am elsewhere, but the switch and Linux do not seem to be familiar with each other. So after starting the Linux boot and switching elsewhere for a bit and coming back a few minutes later, I had only a blinking cursor in the top-left corner of the Linux screen. Realizing (assuming) what had happened, I just stayed right there and did a manual shutdown and rebooted Linux, but then it needed some kind of repair in order to boot at all and the date-and-time were messed up in Linux as well as in Windows 7 (I later discovered) ... and now this morning I had a little trouble getting Windows 7 back up. But after that, I used EasyBCD to take a look at the Linux entry and it looks like EasyBCD and Linux are not working together very well, so I have removed the Linux entry until I am sure everything else is working like it should and I can revisit the matter of adding Linux in my chain of boots.

Stay tuned ...

Odd. I cannot understand why a boot into a Linux styystem should affect a Windows 7 installation - which I would have thought was your default OS, anyway.

The switch you mention seems to be advertised as fully compatible with Linux.

By doing a "manual shutdown", do you mean, "hold the power switch for five seconds"? If so, and you are using journalling filesystems (ext3/4, etc), there should be no significant delay in rebooting Linux, at least.

As a "bit of fun", I did employ:
http://code.google.com/p/quicksynergy/
... for a while. It does (did?) require your "main machine" to have the "real" hardware, and remain up throughout, but it did work rather well, most of the time.

Note that Unix systems (at least, by default) have always kept the hardware clock set to UTC, and do all file time marking according to that. Just one timezone convertion, when a time needs to be displayed in some local time, is ever required. Microsoft set the hardware clock to local time, which causes all sorts of problems.

Here on WP, we are about to enter the realms of "clock nightmare". Some of WP records time according to local time (EST or EDT, depending on when the clocks change in the USA). Then the USA tends to change their clocks three weeks earlier than Europe, so all our post times go wrong by a hour, for a while. I sometimes remember to falsify my time zone offset, for this period, so my brain doesn't explode. Then we change our clocks, and we're back in synch (except for me, until I remember to put back my correct timezone offset). And at the same time as all this is going on, the southern hemisphere has THEIR clocks switching in exactly the opposite direction.

Through all the above - pity any members in India, for example, who have a non-exact-hour offset (+5:30).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_zone

Yes, I had to do the "hold the power switch for five seconds" deal to shut Linux down when it seemed "stuck" with a flashing cursor, but prior to that I had tried a quick power-switch "click" that can sometimes force a safe shutdown of Windows ... and that left my machine sitting there with the drive light blinking for a bit. Overall, I do not know what happened. One possibility *might* be the fact I have 64-bit Mint and the 32-bit version is said to be more stable. So, and after I get moved and re-settled in a few weeks, I might try that instead. In the meantime, however, I do plan to put what I have back in the mix and let it always have the screen during bootup!

I used ext4 when formatting the Mint partition, but I have no idea whether that was best. The manual said to use ext3, but showed a graphic of ext4 ... so I went with that ... but then later I had to guess at LILO when using EasyBCD to add the Linux boot. So, maybe I had caused whatever happened, and I am quite accustomed to having to re-do something more than once to finally get it right!

If you have a 64-bit processor, use the 64-bit version. It's every bit as stable. Also, yes, definitely use ext4, it's more than mature enough by now as long as you have a recent kernel. (The latest mint should be on 2.6.31 or thereabouts?) I've never used Lilo, and I get the impression that Grub is more often used and probably better supported.

I thank you for the advice. I will likely do a re-install just so I can take notes this time through! I think it was right after formatting that I clicked "Advanced" and checked some particular feature to only post Linux to its own partition so I could use EasyBCD later, and maybe that is where I confused something related to the Linux bootup.

EasyBCD uses lilo? Grub and especially Grub 2 are much more sophisticated.

Might be best to use regular Grub if possible ... Grub 2 is not quite stable yet and can sometimes break things. I think the latest Mint uses Grub 2 though (it is a Karmic base, right?) so don't fight your distro over bootloaders unless it becomes a serious problem.