hello!

i just added a new hard drive and installed ubuntu on it. all works fine, i can load both xp and ubuntu. however:

1. after adding the new drive with linux the start up time is MUCH longer. all programs load and i can click on the my computer icon but then i have to stare at the rotating flashlight for about 2 minutes till the system gets a hang on itself.

2. after it has loade i can see my 2 drives, one with windows the other with all my personal stuff BUT i can't see the new third drive which has linux on it. i can see it is listed and working properly in the device manager but not in my computer.

3. i wanted to see if the slow startup is fixed after i unplug my new added drive but then windows will not boot. the GRUB thing starts but gets an error 17. i have to plug in my new hard drive and select windows from the grub option menu. is there a way to uninstall grub so windows loads itself properly?

please someone help me out! anything is welcome. thanks in advance!!

Vlatko

It would help if you described the hard drive setup a bit more. What kind of drives (IDE/SATA) connected to where in what order (master/slave)?

Windows cannot read Linux filesystems by default. You need to install a special driver if you want to do that.

GRUB keeps its configuration files on the Linux partition - unplugging the Linux drive is not a good idea. You can still boot Windows from the GRUB command line of course.

thnx for the reply.

i have one sata drive that is the master. and two ide drives both set as slaves, one of which has linux ubuntu on it.

the thing is i wanted to give linux a shot. i did and i'm afraid it was not for me. so i unplugged the newd drive and hoped everything would be as before. but no. grub started as well only this time he gave some "error 17" and i couldn't boot anything. unless i replug my new drive and boot from there. linux isn't for me so i want to get back to my xp and system before.

someone on the ubuntu forums said grub has taken over my "mbr" and that i need to fix it in order for windows to boot properly. so i did as i was said and put my xp cd in, booted from it, went to repair windows, entered the told command "fixmbr".

all it did was is not starting the grub anymore, but right after the first screem i get a few lines of some windows errors. windows has detected some hardware issues, something was not connected properly...and i don't know what else.

any ideas?

fixmbr was the right thing to do, yes. Try unplugging the Linux drive and see if things improve. Plug the Linux drive back in and run "fixboot" in Recovery Console.

The problem with Windows booting is, that it depends on the exact order of hard drives. For example, if the drives are enumerated as IDE1, IDE2, SATA and Windows is on SATA, then adding or removing any IDE drives will break Windows boot.

so i should plug the drive back in and just run fixboot? no extra parameters like fixboot C: or D:? won't the grub start again if i plug back my 3rd drive?

You are supposed to boot the Windows Recovery Console from the Windows CD, just like when you ran fixmbr.

The Recovery Console automagically finds your Windows installation and fixboot will try to make it bootable - you don't have to bother with any drive letters.

You can always do a repair install of Windows too..