cdrom and new hard drive not there

[minutrice]

ok I put a new slave drive in my old machine. The comp detected the new hard drive and the bios sees it. But now windows doesn't see my slave hd (new one) and my cdrom. I'm sure it is b/c they are both set to primary slave correct? other wise I have no clue why they would be not showing up in windows. Also I'm going to install linux mandrake on this new slave drive. I just need to fdisk and partition right? What program will partition it for me? Does linux come with one. I think I have read this in the getting started thing but I just want some info from you guys.

Thanks

Josh

[DrZaius]

Hi minutrice,

Your drive and CD-Rom aren't detected because they're are both set to primary/slave. Set the drives up like this:

Hard Drive 1: Primary/Master
Hard Drive 2: Primary/Slave
CD-Rom: Secondary/Master

Also, when you install Linux Mandrake it will give you an option to erase the entire disk and install, so you do not need to use fdisk or format because setup does everything (Linux needs a lot of partitions). Just follow the instructions and setup should be easy. Hope that helps.

[minutrice]

when I go into BIOS and tell it to auto detect the secondary marster (cd rom) I isn't detecting it I don't think. But then I go into control panel> and system> device manager and it says there are 2 generic ide devices under disk drives and also a floppy? I'm confused

[minutrice]

ok forget what I said in the last post. Now here is the problem....

When I reboot the computer it shows that it detects the:
old hd (primary master)
new hd (primary slave)
cd rom (secondary master)

When I get into windows and go to my computer to see if it sees the drive it doesn't. It shows:
a: floppy
c: old hd
d: cd rom

shouldn't d: be new hd and e: be cd rom?

How do I make windows see this second hd. I don't understand why windows doesn't when bios does.

Thanks,

Josh

[glc]

Windows will not asssign a drive letter until it has a DOS partition (with fdisk). If you are going to put Linux on it, you don't need a partition - the Linux installer will take care of this for you. Device manager will see it as a generic hard drive whether or not it's partitioned.

[minutrice]

ok another question....
When installing linux it asks to I want to use the free space on the drive, erase the drive, or do a custom partition or something like that (partition it manually).
I am scared to put erase the drive b/c I'm pretty sure it will erase my first hard drive and partition it. But I want it to just partition the second drive for linux. Do I just need to do this manually? If so, how should I partition it?
it is a 10 gig hd so do I set the first 9928 mb for linux and the last 72 for the swap file (i think tha tis what it is called)? Thanks for the help guys.

Josh