Hey all.

I'm very new to Linux, wet behind the ears, blah blah blah...

Here's my situation. I have my main computer, and I want to install Slack on it. However, I don't want to redo my parititions on Windows... way too much stuff to track if I would wipe it. So, I'm thinking I'll go for another hard drive, and just install Linux to that.

I'm getting a bit confused though as to how I could do this. As I understand it, I'd boot off of the floppies, and mount the hard drive, and then install 'normally.'

The actual installation process doesn't confuse me... its the parts before and after. Namely, how would I get the information from my Windows partition, assuming that I downloaded it to a directory there?

Secondly: What bootloader would you all recommend? I've heard awful things about LiLo (that it eats partitions if youre not careful), and I really don't want to mess things up. Would it be feasable to have a boot disk in the floppy when I would want to run Linux, and have it load from that? Or do I have to kludge with other issues...

*sigh* Any other advice to a complete noob would be helpful. Thanks everyone for your time.

A second hard drive is a good way to go. And yes, booting from floppy is quite feasible and just about as fast as from harddisk if you use lilo (all it does is read the boot information and switches to the proper hard drives). I've never seen it eat a partition and it is probably as safe as can be if you boot from floppy.

A sample lilo.conf file for your installation:

boot=/dev/fd0
map=/boot/map
install=/boot/boot.b
prompt
timeout=600
linear
default=vmlinuz

image=/boot/vmlinuz
label=linux
read-only
root=/dev/hdb1
other=/dev/hda1
label=win
table=/dev/hda

The command "lilo -v" will write the boot information to floppy (/dev/fd0). With the floppy in, you will get the lilo prompt, giving you the choice of linux (with /root in /dev/hdb1) or windows (which already has its own boot loader in /dev/hda). With the floppy out, the machine will boot to windows. Note you can also dd your kernel to a floppy (if you make it small enough) and boot to linux from that. The kernel knows enough to search the drives for a /root partition.

Yes, you can put some of the installation files in a directory on windows. I believe when I did it back when redhat 5.2 was new the process was fairly straight forward.

Hey, thanks a lot. That's just what I was looking for.