linux/xp two hard drive question

[mrdeeye]

hey right now im runnin xp on my main drive but have another little 20GB hard drive that i thought i could install linux on....what exactly would i have to do in order to boot the linux hard drive...is it just a matter of changing the IDE cables or the BIOS? Thanks in advance.

-deeye

[TrippinJedi]

im pretty new at this Linux stuff, but in my recent observation you just have to have the linux bootloader installed, i noticed that the default load with the Linux loader is to boot up Linux but it will give you the choice to select windows, i did this with Mandrake 10.0, also another tip i figured out is the first disc, at least with the Mandrake can be booted from and used as a repair disk and can restore you windows bootloader if something goes screwy

[neouser99]

is your primary xp drive a SATA drive?

-neo

[mrdeeye]

no SATA just a regular IDE drive

[Dswissmiss]

What distro are you using? If you're using Mandrake or Fedora it will automatically do it for you.
Basically, you'll have to have a bootloader (grub or lilo) installed on your master boot record (mbr). Then it will give you the option of either booting into your primary hard drive (hda, or hd0 in grub) or into your secondary one (hdb, or hd1 in grub).

[mrdeeye]

awesome....i was plannin on using Mandrake 10, so it looks like it shouldnt be that hard. Although ive heard the stories of people who get frustrated when first getting started with Linux, it should be a fun adventure

[neouser99]

fun...hardly...

frustration is a much better word for it

just make sure you have your XP disk to recreate your old MBR so you can get back into windows if you really screw something up

-neo

[mrdeeye]

even if i install Mandrake on a different hard disk it can still mess up XP? another thing....how am i gonna install it on a different drive. When the CD boots wont it just want to install it on the primary hard drive??

[Dswissmiss]

Btw, you can always quit installing before you actually make changes to the hard drive, so wait for an answer from someone who uses Mandrake, but try this out.

Your primary hard drive should be labeled as hda and your secondary hard drive as hdb. Partitions count up from one, so if you have 3 partitions on your main drive, they would read hda1, hda2 and hda3.

What I'm basically saying is that if you install it on hdb, your primary hard drive will be untouched.

It's happened to me before, I installed linux without configuring my boot loader to able to boot into windows, so I thought I had erased it. Just have your xp disc ready to overwrite the mbr as mentioned if you need to, or ask here and we can show you how to configure it within Mandrake.

But for now, I would put in the disk, and take a look at how everything is labeled.

[neouser99]

as long as your exisiting windows partition are NOT reformatted, they can't not be changed. the only problem that you might run into is that the bootloader doesn't have an option to boot into windows, and will look like it is broken, but it is still there.

as Dswiss stated, if you install on the non primary drive, hdb, hdc, etc. your primary harddrive will not even be touched, by anything.

if I remember right, mandrake gives a couple of options when formatting for the linux partitions, just make sure you don't choose the one that overwrites the entire hard drive. instead, you want the option that fills up existing free space. i think it is disk druid, but i might be thinking of fedora...can't remember these days to many distros

-neo