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#1
Complicated question involving several different OSes coexisting
Sorry for the vague title, but it's true unfortunately. Alright, SO.
I have a little spare miniature desktop that I'm using as a guinea pig for experimenting with different operating systems, namely multi-booting.
Originally, I had the following partition setup on one disk:
NTFS - Windows 7
Ext4 - Ubuntu Server
Ext4 - Xubuntu
Ext4 - Linux Mint
Ext4 - Kali Linux
Swap Space
XFS - General shared storage
And this was all working just fine with a Grub setup which detected everything.
Then I got tricky. I wanted to add a second disk and install Windows XP to it, mainly for the purpose of playing older games that don't work in newer Windows versions (and don't play nice when loaded in VirtualBox). So I installed Windows XP on a second disk, and everything was fine there...except when I tried to boot, or even look for, my other installed OSes.
What essentially ended up happening is Windows XP for some reason put all its boot-related crap on the first HDD, even though I told it only to bother with the second one. I suspect this may have something to do with the order of the SATA ports, with XP just choosing the earliest HDD it sees to store its boot shit on. Now I couldn't find the other operating systems at all.
So I thought, alright, I'll just disconnect the first HDD, load up the XP installation CD, and do a startup repair so that it rights itself on the second disk. Nope. The XP CD apparently sees that there's something labeled as "XP" installed on this disk, but doesn't consider it an XP installation and therefore will not give me the option to go into recovery tools.
Even better. When I reinstalled Grub on the first disk so I could get at my other installations, Windows XP actually cannibalized my Windows 7 entry, so now if I try to load W7 from Grub, I get XP instead.
I guess the point of this thread is to ask how exactly does something like this happen? Why did Windows XP latch its boot material onto the first HDD? Is what I suspected correct, or is it something else? Do other versions of Windows do this as well if you install them after other OSes?