Hi was just wondering what is the best way to go about swapping out a windows installed hhd and pluging a linux installed one back in My system is P4SGX-MX asus motherboard with 2.8 Ghz pentium 4 processor 1 gb sd ram in two sticks and a ATI radeon 7500 128M 64B ddr pci graphics card , has two 40G hhds installed so have tryed unplugging both of those and plugging back in the linux installed one which is also 40G all works well up until the point of booting the kernel then it just hangs with a flashing cursor the version of linux on the disk is redhat 2.4.20-8smp and file system is ext2fs any help would be very welcome if what I am trying to do seems impractical please advise ,my reasons are only that I would like to have a play with linux Cheers oh and one more thing it has Grub installed as the boot loader, thanks

garramodo,

Well, I understand not wanting to commit to something you're not sure of... So I suggest the following:

Instead of cracking the case every time you want to boot up the other system, why not just hop into the bios and disable one disk or the other?

Naturally, the best way to do this whole thing (the super-linux-geeks like myself will tell you) is to set up the linux disk as the primary boot and add the windows disk/partition to the grub loader, but you don't want to do that, so I suggest using the bios as your boot manager.

Oh, just a syntax thing more than anything else here, but hot-swapping is where you'd be doing the switch without rebooting... The reason I started reading was to delve into a potentially interesting phenomena and to poop on it 'cuz it wouldn't work.

Your idea, however, will work nicely.

1 members found this post helpful.

Hi yes you are right that is much easyer than cracking the case but still all works well up until the point of booting the kernel then it just hangs with a flashing cursor ie:
Uncompressing Linux... Ok booting the kernel -
hdd shows up in disk managment when all hdds are enabled but dosnt show in my computer, I presume because it hasnt booted ? does linux need to be configured to my system or should it pick up all hardware ?

Well, a Linux partition wouldn't show up in "My Computer" in Windows as it's likely an extN partition... (ext2/3/4 or reiserfs or xfs, etc)

That said, when you installed Linux on the hdd, was it the ONLY drive enabled at the time on the system or was the windows drive up and running at the time of Linux install?

The unfortunate thing about boot loaders is that they have to see the same load-out of disks every time they boot your O/S. Otherwise changes must be made.

Which distro are you currently running? Can you disable the windows drive and maybe use the distro's repair option? (SUSE, RHEL, Fedora, and CentOS typically have repair options)

1 members found this post helpful.

Hi yeh finally got back I bought the hhd at a garage sale with linux allready installed the distro is redhat 2.4.20-8smp I presume this is the distro I am a newbie to linux so am still learning can you please tell me more about the repair options sounds like that might be the go

I would guess the distribution is Redhat 9 which is obsolete, not worth the effort to repair and you would be better off with something newer. I suggest trying out various distributions via live CDs and then install the one you like the best. ubuntu is a good starting point. Checkout www.distrowatch.com

1 members found this post helpful.

yeh thanks Michaelk you are probably right I was just trying to get into this one to have a look anyway and its getting to the point of giving up but damit I dont like giving up anyway thanks for your and Lylemwoods help much appreciated