# Multiple IDE Drive Problems

## NicZak

Before I say anything else I must say I KNOW THIS IS A GENTOO FORUM!  More importantly I am not by any means advocating the use of Windows XP in anyway what-so-ever and the last thing I want is for this post to turn into an outlet for O/S bashing.  With that said, here it goes:  I have two eide hard drives and have been running gentoo on the primary (master) drive and windows 2000 on the other (slave).  After running 2000 on the 2nd drive for almost a year now it was time to format and start fresh.  Of course my gentoo drive is running very smoothly and there is no reason to alter/move that one, as I have no desire to change my fstab / grub configurations around which of course would be the case if I made that drive the slave.  So without any more rambling, here is my problem in short: 

        I want to keep my gentoo drive as primary master (which includes the mbr of course) and install winxp on my second (slave) drive.  Now I know that there isn't any way to get around the xp installer altering my MBR, but its easy enough to reinstall grub if thats the case (i already made a boot disk), BUT xp wont even start the installation because it claims that it *needs* to alter the mbr of hd0 (primary) but it can't because it is of an "unreadable format" (ext3).  Is there a workaround?  I can't imagine that I am the only person who wants xp on my second drive?  Even if it makes no difference in terms of functionality, its a matter of principal, linux should ALWAYS take precedence over windows. =)  Thank you in advance for putting up with this excessively long, wordy post and I hope that someone has a solution!  

- NicZak

----------

## magoo

 *NicZak wrote:*   

>  BUT xp wont even start the installation because it claims that it *needs* to alter the mbr of hd0 (primary) but it can't because it is of an "unreadable format" (ext3).  Is there a workaround? 

 

i would suggest taking out the gentoo drive, having only the windows one (as primary master or what have you) and installing windows that way. then when its set up, put your system back to the way it was with the gentoo disk in, and all should be well to boot if you kept your windows partion information the same.

----------

## lx

see:

https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=3288

----------

