I have XP on my primary master drive and I want to also install linux on my secondary master/slave drives but when i try it doesnt seem to work.

grub gets installed on my primary master's mbr but then it doesnt work as i get the error, "grub hard disk error"

what steps do i need to take to properly get linux to boot on my secondary ide channel's hd?

(it seems like i can only get it to work when i have linux installed on different partitions of my primary hd, but i dont want to do that now)

Some more detailed information would be a great help. Such as: which distro are you trying to install? How many partitions on the primary drive? How many partitions on the slave drive? What steps do you take during installation to create and format one or more partitions on the slave drive in which to install Linux?

As Johnny 5 would say: "Need input!"

Why does it matter what distro? I am trying to install Fedora 8 and I may try Ubuntu and RedHat

There is only one partition on the primary drive and there is only one partition on all the other drives I am using.

All I do is select a drive to install linux on, i dont mess with anything else. I chose to install Fedora on my secondary master and then secondary slave and the mbr of my primary was edited and i had grub (sorta) but like i said it told me that grub hard disk error message.

i was just wondering if it mattered which drive i install it on and the order of installation xp then linux or whatever.

hope that is better. thanks for the help..