i'm really interested in trying out slackware. i have a new hard disk (SATA) that I plan to attach as the primary slave. I've never tried this before however. I've looked around LQ and can't find any similar situations. After I attach the hard disk, how do access it to begin partitioning?

another issue i was thinking about is booting. i have winxp and mandrake on my primary master and I believe I should be able to boot slack from my existing lilo. can this be done? any "better" way to do it?

thanks

When installing slackware and it boots up and prompts for you to partition the disks, etc, you can partition your secondary drive by doing the following:

cfdisk /dev/hdb

And you will only be partitioning your second hd. If you need to partition your master drive, simply typing cfdisk or cfdisk /dev/hda will prompt to partition only that drive, etc.

And yes, you can easily use your existing loader to load slack at boot time, just be sure to skip over installing lilo during the install. And you'll need to edit your boot loader accordingly afterwards on the slackware specific details, etc.

ok..so i skip the lilo install after installing slackware..any tips on how to edit lilo to boot to slack?

I am not sure but i heard that SATA is not supported by the current 9.1 's 2.4.22 kernel. You may have to compile your own custom kernel in order to get SATA going. Try to find out more on this.

yes, i have a 2.6.2 kernel custom compiled for mandrake 9.2 right now..but i need to know how to edit lilo to boot to slack from the primary master

To set up lilo you need to create a new entry in the /etc/lilo.conf file.
Run your other distro and edit lilo.conf. duplicate an existing entry and change the label, image and root references to point to your Slackware installation. You may still need a bootdisk with support for SATA though.

hmmm..i never thought of that. That was one of things I wasn't sure what would happen. I know SATA is not supported by the 2.4.x series so I'm wondering if Slack will even be able to boot up from there?

i've connected my SATA drive via host adapter. i have an existing pata drive which is my boot drive. however, when i rebooted with the slack cd after installing the sata drive, i can't run fdisk on /dev/hdb. How do I know which drive is the SATA drive?

I think i read somewhere that SATA drives have "boot priority" is that true? I can't even get into Mandrake 9.2 (w/ 2.6.2 that has SATA support) without kernel panic. What's going on?

You either have to boot with a kernel that has support for SATA compiled in, or a kernel/initrd image that will load the modules, so that the SATA drive can bemounted as root. If the SATA is the boot device you need akernel with support compile-in. You can make one in another running system. then boot with that and copy your distro over or install packages to the new HD. chroot into the new drive/installation and run lilo there.

i see. problem is, slack doesn't seem to detect my other hard disk ( the pata) which has mandrake and winxp on it. i have 2.6.2 in mandrake but slack seems to think my new SATA is /dev/hda. is soemthing wrong?

btw, when i try to load mandrake 9.2, it crashes, probably due to the sata drive...