[Slice]

At the moment my system runs a 1.5 TB harddrive which is dual booting Ubuntu 10.10 and Windows 7.

I've just got my hands on a brand new (and free) 500GB maxtor drive. To make the most of this I decided to split my operating systems onto two drives. I want to leave Ubuntu as it is, and put windows on the 500GB drive.

In theory, it's not the hardest thing to do. Simply remove the windows partition from this drive, extern ubuntu to take up all the space, then install the new harddrive and load on windows 7.

But how will this affect the boot loader? Will it create a new one for windows on the new drive? Will I have to run a live cd ubuntu, after installation, to fix the grub bootloader?

I've never done this before so some advice would be great.

[no2pencil]

I would leave grub on the MBR of the current hard drive, throw Ubuntu onto the new 500GB drive, & leave Windows on the main 1.5TB drive. Adjust the Grub configuration to point Ubuntu to the new drive, & reboot. This will be the hd0 part.

If there are any issues, you can boot off the boot cd & adjust the Grub config.

Can you provide your current Grub config?

[Slice]

Well I've managed to get it done now, and it's sort of okay.

If I power on the system it boots into ubuntu automatically (on the 1.5tb) which is great since I use it the most. If I want to boot into windows, I have to manually choose to boot that harddrive from the bios menu. This isn't that big of a deal and it's something I can live with.

Just out of curiosity, why would you have ubuntu on the smaller drive? The only reason I left it on the bigger drive is because that's what I use for all my downloads/file storage&server/video editing/web design

I have about two games I play occasionally on the windows drive, other than that I hardly use it.

[lemonchicken]

i would suggest 2x 50-200gb partitions, on which you install your win7 and ubuntu
create and install your os's on the freshly partitioned (and ideally, formatted) drive --attatched to the 1st sata port on your mobo.


now you will want to optimize your boot time;

once into windows press win+r
type msconfig

click on the 'boot' tab and select 'No GUI Boot'

followed by clicking on 'advanced options' & changing the number of processers windows will use whilst booting, to however many cores your processor has..

okokok

restart if you want

[lemonchicken]

now that i've properly read your topic, ubuntu will show in the windows boot loader, which will then redirect to grub.