Thanks for your response, Ray. I am still not particularly clear about the /boot partition -- what exactly is it used for? I did have an older BIOS on this hard-drive a while ago, and needed the /boot partition then to dual boot. Now, if my BIOS can "see" all of /dev/hdb then its not necessary for this partition to exist?
Right. /boot (the directory) is where, by convention, you put the image of the Linux kernel that lilo or GRUB (or something else) will load at boottime. SInce the kernel hasn't been loaded yet, the bootloader has to rely on the BIOS to access the portion of the hard disk where the kernel-image resides. So if the BIOS cannot access that location, the kernel cannot load.
Usually (actually, I've never seen an exception with ide drives, but I don't know enough to say always) even if the BIOS cannot access the entire hard disk, it can access the "first" part of it. So a traditional workaround is to make /boot its own small partition, say 50 MB, best created as hda1 to be sure you're where the BIOS can find it.
BTW, the Linux kernel does not use the BIOS to access hard disks. That's why it can access portions of a hard disk that the BIOS cannot see. But the kernel can't use this trick to load itself, for what I hope are obvious reasons.
I would probably use GRUB as the bootloader -- isn't it likely that GRUB will be able to figure out how to modify my MBR on /dev/hda so that I could boot windows from /dev/hda and Linux from /dev/hdb? Whats a good way to save the MBR and the partition-info (and restore, if need be)?
Actually, as I recall (I use lilo, not GRUB, so I'm a bit hazy on this), if you are now running GRUB, you won't need to modify the actual MBR to change things. GRUB is a multi-stage bootloader, and only the first pieces is in the MBR. A later stage actually reads the GRUB config file during boot. If you're now using lilo, then you will need either to reinstall it or install GRUB.
I don't know a way to read the actual MBR; normally, you would "save" it by keeping the LILO or GRUB config file you used to install it.
I would like to follow your advice in switching the drives around and reinstalling both windows and Linux -- but, all I have for the windows "install" CD is a custom HP-disk which is quite useless now, since I don't have the HP-system anymore :-? Moreover, there are way too many things installed under the m$oft-OS, that I don't wish to go through trying to reinstall.
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