I was reading Red Hat 6.1's in depth system information guide, and ran across the following passage:

"On First weo IDE Drives:
If you have two IDE(or EIDE) drives, /boot must be located on one of them. Note that this two-drive limit also includes any IDE CDROM drives on your primary IDE controller. So, If you have one IDE hard drive, and one CD ROM on your primary controller, /boot must be located on the first hard drive ONLY, even if you have other hard drives on your secondary IDE controller. "

WHAT IS THIS SAYING? I plan on dual-booting with different hard drives. I want to have Windows on hda and Linux on hdb. Does this mean that LILO, or my /boot partition for that matter, has to reside on hda, with Windows? I have the following on my computer:

(1) 7.5 Gigabyte hard drive with Windows
(1) 30 gigabyte hard drive for Linux (will be added soon!)
(1) ATAPI CD ROM drive
(1) NEC floppy drive

(hope that helps with answering my question.)

Will I be able to dual boot without putting LILO or my entire /boot partiton on hda? Thanks for any help that can be provided!

*****Colonel Panic*****

Error in the post!weo ide drives

This is wrong. The weo is supposed to be two. sorry. typo.

*****Colonel Panic*****

Hello

In a similar situation, I was scared!

Had 8 Gb drive and an idea. Bought a 36 Gb drive for RH7.0.

What did I do??

Removed win98disc from box

Installed new HDD

Installed RH7.0

Booted till happy.

Reinstalled win98 disc

Rebooted

Linux offered to set it up. Said YES.

Linux ran perfectly until I stuffed it up

To run Win I changed BIOS boot sequence.

Mounted windisc using usual commands


After 2 months deleted windows from hdb


Don't Be afraid

Jim

If you are going to install linux you need to go ahead and install the windows system first, then you can put lilo on the mbr of the first hard drive, it will handle booting windows and linux for you. There are some good howtos written on this, in the installation guide if you are using rh 7.1 it is explained in detail.

You could always boot linux from a floppy, but I prefer using the mbr.

If you decide to change it later you can fix it with a win boot disk.

If you are thinking that you need or want to put a boot sector on both drives in order to boot each individual OS the answer is no. One boot sector on one drive will control the booting to both drives even if windows is on one and Linux is on the other.

It is best to already have windows setup first (if dual booting).
Get a hold of some type of none dustructive partitioning program like partition magic( Ive used it many times and never had a problem) the program can format the second drive for linux.

Then install linux and follow the prompts

Word of advice. do your homework on installing linux. find everything you possibly can about the linux install. there is lots of information out there

Col. Panic: stop panicing.

You probably know this, but IDE works like this: there are two IDE channels on the motherboard, the Primary channel and the Secondary channel, and each channel can have two devices (hard drives, CD-ROMs, DVD players, etc.). One device on each channel is the master, the second is the slave. The master/slave designation is determined by setting jumpers on each device.

All that the Redhat doc is saying is that /boot must be on a *hard drive* on the primary IDE channel. So as to your question- if you have two drives, and they are both on the primary channel, you're all set. Just follow the combined advice of David Phillips' and johncla's posts and you're on your way.

What Redhat is alluding to is that if you have a hard drive as your primary master device, but the primary slave is *not* a hard drive, then you only have one qualifying device on which to install /boot. If that's the case, just switch the positions/connections of your devices so that your second hard drive is th Primary Slave.

Hello, here is my 2 cents....

I run MDK 7.2 and 8.0, and I thought at first you would need a /boot partition. After experimenting though, I found that /boot is not required. Here is what you do.

Install Linux on hdb, and when LILO configuration comes up, select where Win is for its boot menu. It is will install on the mbr of hda. /boot is not required for this.


In fact, I run Win98, NT, 2000, OS/2, BeOS, Linux, and FreeBSD..(I like to play), and without a /boot partition, I can get into any of these jsut fine, and the mbr is writen to hda mbr.