Hello, i had a question about dual booting. I currently have mandrake on my first hard drive, along with windows xp. Im almost certain in a few days im gona wipe off xp and just go linux all the way.
Well, my question is, on my second hard drive i have installed in my computer, id like to use it to also experiment with a different distro of linux as well. Is this possible? Can I boot to a system on a second hard drive?
The reason i ask is because i originally was gona have windows xp on my first hard drive and mandrake on the second, but this seemed to be a problem and didnt quite work out like i had hoped. Any information on this subject would be helpful and much appreciated. Thanks in advance.

You can have three or four on the first drive and three or four on the second one too. Linux don't really care where it is as long the bootloader points to it.

If you can, pick Grub as your bootloader and figure out the setup. It is easier when doing multiple Linux OS's. That is my advise. I boot Mandrake 9.2 and Gentoo 1.4. I had a devil of a time with lilo. Grub was OK.

Welcome to Linux.

Later

Alright, sounds good. I will give grub a try as well. So the best thing to do when installing another os is to not let it install a boot loader and the once it is done, boot into your original os and configure the boot loader then, right. Sounds right to me, so i guess thats how i will do it.
If something goes wrong, like say the boot loader does get messed up, isnt it possible to just flick in the mandrake install cd, boot it up and then reinstall/configure the boot loader again?
I know that is possible with winxp because i had to do it a few times. The commands were fixmbr.

Well usually when you install Redhat or Mandrake at least it will just add the entry to what you already have installed. You should let it add those for you. Easier that way. When you know you are planning to install a new OS, make a copy of the conf file and print it in case you need to re-enter it.

If you install Gentoo or something then you have to do that manually. Whole new story then. Make sure you have a extra copy then. For sure.

I always put the bootloader in the MBR. Some don't.

If you install Mandrake and need to, you can boot from the CD and 'rescue' the Linux OS. I have never had to do it but you can.

When you get the chance, MAKE A BOOT DISK! You are drowning and I just threw you a life preserver. Got it? I cheat and boot from the Gentoo CD. Not very fun but it works. Knoppix is a good one for that too.

Try this link for install help.

http://www.linuxsolved.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=10

Hope that helps. Yep, I wrote it.

Later, bedtime.

Sounds good. Well, the other os i was thinking of trying is actually FreeBSD just for the heck of it. I probably wont keep it too long as im sure its way too advanced for me, but i do have the disks, so what the heck, might as well try it out. Ill probably end up just installing a different linux os later on this hard drive.
Another thing, when i go to make a boot floppy, it keeps telling me that it wont fit on my floppys. They are correct size, and i have tried quite a few different ones. I dont know why it wont work, but it gives me that error each time. Thats why, in case i dont get a boot floppy, i want to make sure that there will be at least one way into my mandrake distro being that its probably gona stay the main one on this computer.