I am missing something when it comes to parttioning and multiple drives in RHEL4. I have two ide drives (80gb and 120gb) in my machine. I want to keep my os on the 80 and use the 120 for storage space. I want the two to not be dependant on one another. So if my storage (120) dies my 80 will still boot properly. Thus far I have unsucessfully partitioned and installed 3 times.

I have tried creating /, swap, tmp, /boot, and var on the 80gb disk and utilizing the 120 as /storage. The only problem is if I disconnect my storage drive the os will not boot (error loading operating system). So I'm guessing that /storage is considered part of the os file sytem and has to be there in this cofiguration.

I tried using lvm on the 80gb drive for my filesystem and making the 120 gb /storage. When I unplug the 120 it will not boot and says something about not finding the label /storage.

How should I be setting this up this so that my os and data storage are seperate?

That sounds like it might be dying during processing of the fstab. I can say I've ever unplugged the drive on system so configured to see what happens (though now I'm curious, so this is something I will try soon :-). Should this turn out to be the case, one thought is to not have /storage mounted automatically by the fstab but rather add a startup script to test for existence of the storage drive and then mount /storage if everything is ok.