Working on making a dual boot again, WinXP & Ubuntu 513

Unfortunately, yes. As soon as you go over the first 4 IDE drives, you need luck. Or if you have an SATA-SCSI controller that messes with the BIOS disk order.

Sorry, no. I did this only once. I have been using Grub to dual-boot XP-Linux forever and no issue so far as long as I kept Windows on the first IDE disk. Linux can be basically anywhere, but my best experiences are with a small, 100MB primary parbreastion as first parbreastion (before the XP one) on the first disk with ext2 format. Just put Grub config and kernels on it. XP ignores it. The rest of the Linux system(s) can be anywhere the kernel sees, I have them on the primary disk after all the XP parbreastions and the RAID1 mirrors on the first SATA disk at the beginning. Its basically a working system with 3 parbreastions and a data dump and two rescue systems, one on each disk.

Yes, me too.

Not really. I am happy with Grub. And it allows you to interactively search through what it sees, and list files on parbreastions during boot, if your configuration is messed up. I found that most helpful in the past, even though the interface is a bit primitive.

Arno