I recently got a new machine, a Dell Dimension 9100, and wanted to install Red Hat 9.0 on it as a dual boot. I wanted to keep it separate from the Windows that the machine came with, so I installed a second SATA drive. When I tried to install, I got a message that there was no hard drive. It suggested that it needed a driver and gave a long list of drivers. I have no clue which, if any, will work. I went to the maker of the hard drive, Western Digital, but could not find any drivers for Linux. I would appreciate any advice on how to proceed.

It's not the hard drive but the SATA interface you need drivers for. Red Hat 9.0 predates the release of SATA and the boot disks won't have any SATA drivers unless you add they yourself. You should probably try Fedora instead.

Do yourself a favor, and make sure that a significant portion of your Windows drive is a Fat32 partition, too. Not quite related to your question, but important, nonetheless.

U can talk Dell People, as per my knowledge dell is not recommanding the FC also they are recommanding only Redhat Enterprise only. Ok just try FC5 it may work

Maybe a little off topic here but could you please elaborate on this comment? I do not know a whole lot about disc partitioning and I see an opportunity here to learn something new. I have a dual boot with WinXP Pro on one HD and Ubuntu on another. The WinXP HD is NTFS and I havent had any problems. Is this something that should be done if Windows shares a drive with Linux or is this only related to SATA drives? I would appresciate it if you could explain. Thank You.

The FAT32 partition is readable and writable by both OSs. So you can move data files back and forth between Windows and Linux easily.

I did not know that. Thanks for the info, thats good to know.

Umm, just an addendum: linux can read NTFS since a long time. The new kernel even has limited write capabilities (AFAIR it can't create directories and can write a limited number of files per session). HTH .

I used to be able to read my windows drive (I have windows and Linux on two seperate drives) when I had SuSE/KDE but now I am running Ubuntu/Gnome and I cannot even see the windows drive. I could view my files on the windows drive (pictures, documents, movies etc.) but now I don't even see the drive. I don't know if that is a Gnome thing or an Ubuntu thing but it would be nice to at least be able to read the drive. SuSE let me read it and it is formatted NTFS, but I couldn't write to it.

How is it mounted? Please post relevant lines from /etc/fstab...

Here is fstab:

# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass>
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
/dev/hdb1 / ext3 defaults,errors=remount-ro 0 1
/dev/hdb5 none swap sw 0 0
/dev/hdc /media/cdrom0 udf,iso9660 user,noauto 0 0
/dev/hdd /media/cdrom1 udf,iso9660 user,noauto 0 0

windows is on hda1 which is obviously not listed here.