Aftering fritzzing about for far too long trying to find a way to get a dual-boot set up working on my current machine, I've decided to give up.
The current configuration is a pair of disks on the ICH5 as Raid-0 and another pair non-Raided on the Promise controller. After building a GRUB floppy (using a SuSE 9.3 Live CD) I discovered that during boot the BIOS is presenting only hd0 (the psuedo RAID-0 volume, I presume), all other disks upto hd6 presenting disk read error 25 when probed with the geometry command. This probably explains why GRUB gets stuck on stage 1.5, since it's boot partition is on hd2 and it can't see it.
At this point I have four choices:
- Attempt the build on PATA, patch for SW RAID and transfer trick
- Image the Windows partition, break the RAID, restore the image to unRAIDed disks, do normal Linux install
- Break the RAID, re-install Windows from scratch, etc
- Build a Boot CD and reconfigure the BIOS every time
Frankly, I don't fancy the first, since if something goes wrong later I'll have to repeat all the trickery. I'll take some pain initially, but don't want to repeat the experience.
The second is slightly risky, but will probably work out fine.
The third may be better due to inevitable Windows Bit Rot (why does my XP Professional Backup seem to have decided to work like XP Home now, failing to build ASR backups ?), but it's a lot of work to get everything re-installed and set up again.
The last one remains continually inconvenient.
It's going to be 2 or 3. Just gotta decide which one. Maybe even 2 then 3.
