Please bear with me as I am fairly new to Ubuntu and this may be long-winded. So I have an old PC with BIOS. It came preinstalled with XP on one drive. I installed Windows 7 on a 2nd drive. I have a third drive that I would like to install Ubuntu on. My computer can only have 2 drives attached at once. I don't want Grub affecting my Windows boot in any way as the third drive may fail. I plan on swapping drives out occasionally. My main question is 1) if I install Ubuntu on the third drive, being the only drive attached during install and running, does this change anything on the motherboard for booting or is it just on the hard drive? 2) Will it ask for my Windows drive(s) during booting? 3) If I have my two Windows disks plugged in, will the boot ask for the Ubuntu (Grub) boot? I know there is the option of dual booting and even triple booting, but I really don't want to do that. I want to keep Ubuntu booting and Windows booting completely separate. Thanks for any help you guys can offer
02 Answers
- No, this does not change anything on the Motherboard.
- No it will not ask for your Windows drive.
- Assuming the 3rd being the only drive attached during install as you said under 1, once you attach other drives they will independently start up depending on the boot order defined in your BIOS settings. On most systems you can even choose which drive to boot using the corresponding F-Key.
If you want to keep it completely separate, disconnect the two windows drives during ubuntu installation. That way, grub will install to the MBR of the ubuntu drive and the other two will go untouched.
No, nothing on the MOBO will be changed.
Also, most of the time, you can enter the boot settings during startup and there will be a choice of hard drives so you can choose the ubuntu drive during regular startup from there after installation.
