Hey everyone, currently I have an XP box with two sata drives in it. One being my primanry windows boot disk the other disk is doing nothing. I would like to dual this box up with core 5 - what would my best approach be? I am thinking that I should unplug my windows HD and install linux on the other HD with grub - then once the linux box is up and running add the windows hd back and tweek grub. Is this the best way to pull off o dual booting system with the least amount of risk for data loss?

Thanks

I would install fc5 and place grub on the mbr. If you plug windows hd back in it won't boot your linux hd.

yes it will. you can plug your linux disk in as master, xp as slave and set both drives to cable select. Edit grub (i think it is menu.lst) to give the option to boot from your other hard drive. This is how saikee told me to do it. I believe he has a web page devoted to this question. His page shows it slightly different than he told me how to, because I had already gone ahead and done some, and it was easier to just set my jumpers to cable select, however his page here helps a lot.
http://www.justlinux.com/forum/showt...hreadid=130715
This method places linux entirely on a different disk, with grub on that disk, and leave winxp untouched "like a virgin"

You can do it that way. But you have to remember there are more than one way to do things. In short I gave him the way that I have done it several times and know it to work.

nitrohuffer2001 has SATA drives. Does SATA have master / slave / cable select ? If I look at this as an example, I doubt it very much.

SATA doesn't have master/slave issues as far as I am aware. I would install grub to the mbr of the first boot hard drive listed in the BIOS. But that is a strategy based on PATA installs and the assumption that the underlying workings of grub do not change depending on whether you have SATA or PATA.

Not saying that your way wont work. But one of the parameters he gave for his dual boot was that he wanted the least amount of risk. And now I am not sure, since I missed the part about it being a SATA drive. I don't know about that.

SATA can, by definition, only have 1 drive per port/cable, so there is no concept of master/slave/etc.

nitrohuffer2001, your original suggestion is probably what I'd do (though there are other ways of course...), just lob in a bit of drive mapping in the grub menu.lst.

jstephens84 and Jongi appear to be suggesting that you just install Linux on the second drive and install grub to the mbr of the first (boot) drive. This is also fine, and the easiest solution as it requires no drive juggling. The only snag with that is you won't be able to boot the Linux drive on its own if you ever need to remove the windows drive, which may or may not be an issue. You'd just need to remember to install grub on the second drive if you do ever do need to do that. Personally, I prefer each drive to be bootable by itself, just for the flexibility.