From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.3) Gecko/20030312 Description of problem: Windows 95 (probably many newer) can not boot from a slave hard drive, even when particularly specifying, i.e., "rootnoverify (hd1,0)". But GRUB can easily be configured to work around this using the "map" argument: # load Windows on a second (slave) hard drive title Windows map (hd1) (hd0) rootnoverify (hd0,0) chainloader +1 Read more here: http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/grub-faq.en.html#q10 This should be the default setup when a vfat filesystem is detected on any drive other than the primary. (Note GRUB properly detected the filesystem and location, and even passed off to the OS, Windows just failed to boot from there.) Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): (default, not sure) How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: Occurs with any default RH9 install with a Windows 95 (newer?) OS on a non-primary drive partition. Additional info: It seems likely this would be an acceptable even on a later version of Windows that *was* able to handle booting from non-primary. I'm categorizing as Severity:High because it completely disables the OS. (*skips opportunity to make jokes*)
Depends entirely on BIOS and version of Windows. Newer versions of Windows are able to boot from a slave hard drive fine -- I know I did it with Windows 98 many years ago.