How can i get linux to work on a seperate drive from windows
 

I have two drives, One happily with XP on, and the other with crap. I decided to load Linux on the 2nd drive.

So i didnt mess up the first one i unplugged it and put the 2nd as master etc. Then i installed the eval iso version of linux from the site and it all worked fine.

After i plugged the 1st drive back in as master, and put the 2nd to slave again, i cant boot up linux from the bios like i thought id be able to. Seems like a script error.

How should i have loaded on linux...do i have to reload it.

Thanks

Jordan

When you installed Linux, you put it on the master drive (hda). Then you installed that drive as a slave drive (hdb) and put the windows drive as master. Now your bootloader is looking for Linux on the windows drive and obviously is not finding it.

It's best to install Linux onto a system as is (including windows), it's quite safe. Linux will recognise a windows installation and will include it in the bootloader. Just make sure you don't choose to install on you windows drive (hda).

Your options now are either edit the bootloader config file or reinstall Linux without removing drives. I'd go with the second option

You should be able to download and burn to cd something like knoppix. Or, if you have some other distro on install cd, boot from the cd.
Then, edit the running version of /etc/fstab to list the linux partition and a mount point for it. If the mount point doesn't exist, create one: something like 'mkdir /mnt/linux' would work.
The line to add to fstab would read something like:
/dev/hdb /mnt/linux ext2 defaults.
If you installed linux with some other filesystem type such as ext3, reiserfs, etc., use that instead of ext2.
Now the working fstab lists the mount point for the linux partition on hdb.
Open a term window and give the command: mount /mnt/linux.
That will mount the partition. Now, navigate to the /mnt/linux/boot/ directory and edit /grub/grub.conf (or /grub/menu.lst if that's what you're using), or find the lilo.conf file if you're using lilo as bootloader. Edit the kernel line to point to:
kernel (hd1,0)/vmlinuz root=/dev/hdb1
This assumes that you have only one partition on hdb, and that's where linux is.
Then, install the bootloader to the MBR. That should make linux bootable, but XP not bootable. Edit the bootloader conf file to add XP. There are tons of posts on this topic on these boards.
Once, these steps are complete, both OS's should be bootable from the linux boot loader.