Fedora 16 install on esata drive

[barlow]

I have a Dell E6420 with an esata port. Plugged an internal hard drive into the external esata port with a data cable. Also, connected a power cable directly to the "external drive" since the port did not power it up. The internal drive has windows xp sp3 on it. The bios shows the esata connected drive as an available boot option. So, I put my fedora 16 live flash drive in and boot to it. I run the option to install to disk. I select the blank "external (esata) drive" as the drive to write the os to and the internal drive and usb drives show up as data drives to be mounted (no option for not mounting them that I could see). I select the radio button to indicate I want the mbr to reside on the os drive. I was hoping to wind up with two os's to boot to with their own mbr's. Fedora 16 booted fine from the external drive. Xp gave me the blue screen of death while booting. Never had a problem with xp before this process. Could it be that Fedora 16 wrote to the mbr of the xp drive in this scenario and corrupted it? Or possibly the act of just mounting the ntfs drive caused a problem. It just does not make sense to me that installing Fedora to a completely different drive with its own mbr should blow up my xp drive. Any thoughts? Oh also, it turns out the xp drive is encrypted (its a work drive).

[fantab]

Originally Posted by barlow

I have a Dell E6420 with an esata port. Plugged an internal hard drive into the external esata port with a data cable. Also, connected a power cable directly to the "external drive" since the port did not power it up. The internal drive has windows xp sp3 on it. The bios shows the esata connected drive as an available boot option. So, I put my fedora 16 live flash drive in and boot to it. I run the option to install to disk. I select the blank "external (esata) drive" as the drive to write the os to and the internal drive and usb drives show up as data drives to be mounted (no option for not mounting them that I could see). I select the radio button to indicate I want the mbr to reside on the os drive. I was hoping to wind up with two os's to boot to with their own mbr's. Fedora 16 booted fine from the external drive. Xp gave me the blue screen of death while booting. Never had a problem with xp before this process. Could it be that Fedora 16 wrote to the mbr of the xp drive in this scenario and corrupted it? Or possibly the act of just mounting the ntfs drive caused a problem. It just does not make sense to me that installing Fedora to a completely different drive with its own mbr should blow up my xp drive. Any thoughts? Oh also, it turns out the xp drive is encrypted (its a work drive).

Correct me if I have not Understood you clearly,

• You have two HDD, /dev/sda Internal with Windows XP and /dev/sdb External with Fedora?
• You have installed GRUB2 on /dev/sdb?
• Windows XP does not boot and shows BSOD?

Does XP show BSOD when you load it from GRUB2?
Or
When you load it directly?

Are you sure you installed GRUB2 on /dev/sdb which has Fedora installed?
Have you changed the BIOS BOOT-ORDER for your HDDs to boot /dev/sdb first? (by default BIOS will select first HDD).