2 drive setup
 

A few years ago I set up a system of mine that had 2 HD, one with redHat 8 and one with windows XP. I no longer have that system and would like to do this again. Could someone refresh my memory on how to do this. My system has one drive now with XP loaded. I bought another drive to load Linux. I need to format it and then load up linux. Does it matter which drive I make the master and which one the slave.
I was thinking that I could make the new blank drive the master and load linux. I could then use lilo or grub to boot to either drive. I prefer lilo, because that is what I used before.
Is there a good order to do this? I can't seem to remember how I did this before for sure. I do remember that the system can be picky when do this. I appreciate the help and suggestions. I will continue looking for my answer while waiting for a reply. Thanks!

Most distros these days have drive partitioning and bootloader installment as part of their install programs. Just run the install after wiring up master/slave and go for it.

window will fight for the primary master and primary partition in that (to best of my knowledge).
so you will have to keep windows drive as the primary master.

.

you could install linux in second drive and install its lilo/grub in the MBR of first drive. But again the tricky issue is.....if you remove your linux drive....your system won't boot even to windows.

If i would be at your place i would have done the following things.
1. let windows be there in the primary master only.
2. free few Gb (5Gb or more) space in this drive.
3. install linux there and its bootloader in the MBR.
4. mount the second drive. and format it as per need (may be linux file system or windows)
5. make entry in /etc/fstab so that no need to manually mount the drive everytime.
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this way even if you remove your second drive.....you will still have windows as well as linux running on machine.

regards

Thanks for the advice. I also found this article here. It was very similar to what I wanted to do. I set my boot.ini on windows to give an option for Linux.
I have XP home on my primary drive and the new seagate up as the secondary drive (unformatted). I put in the 1st disk and started up the computer thinking that it would get to a point where I could take a look at the drives on my system and then format the new seagate secondary drive and load linx there. When I started stepping through the questions, I get to the page (about four pages in on gui setup) that asks about install method and all I have is
NFS
FTP
HTTP
Hard Drive
no CD choice.
so, I pick Hard Drive and it tells me that I do not have and HD's installed on my system. My Bios and CMOS see and recognize both drives on the system.

Thought that the cd installer would recognize everything (drives on the system) and then I could format the new disk.??

I kind of wanted to stick with just installing linux on the second drive and config lilo, because it was the route that I took before (thought it would eventually be familiar) even though if I remove that second drive later it may cause a problem.

Another thing that I do not like is I have no floppy drive in the system that I'm working with at the present time.

hi,
which distro are you trying to install ???
An easy way out for you is to format the new drive after booting into the windows (i'm assuming that the new hard drive is visible there).

regards

I'm loading up Redhat 8. I probably need to download a newer version of Linux in some Distro.
I'm planning on going into windows and getting into disk mngmt and formatting the slave drive. Is there some issue with NTFS and linux or RedHat? I probably won't get to it until this weekend.

I tried to go into Bios and change the HD disk priority to boot the slave drive first over the primary, but it would not allow me to change this order in Bios.

hi,

you must go for some new distibution.

ya certainly there are.
Depending on the distro, you may or may not have the read access to the NTFS partition. If read access is not there by default then you will have to recompile the kernel for that. And write access is still under testing phase.

Check out the jumper settings.

regards

BWALL , I HAD THE SAME PROBLEM WHEN I BOUGHT MY P4 WITH INTEL D865GBF MOTHER BOARD (which was the new thing in market @ that time ) the reason linux would not get installed its there was a BIOS option that had to be changed , which motherboard do u use may b its the same problem? (cant reboot to check now lil post it later but it might be a combination of OLD DISTRO , NEW MOBO
POST UR MOBO 's name + model , i might also help in chanign boot device 's order