Installing debian woody on /dev/hdb1
 

I tried installing woody on my second hard drive (40 gb)

The hard drive is the slave drive on my primary IDE channel.

The boot drive has XP installed and I don't want to modify this disk MBR or install LILO.

I taught I could install debian on the second drive, then simply tell my BIOS to boot from the second drive and all would be fine.

It does not work.

Debian Installed, at the last reboot, before installing packages, it rebooted but nothing happend (after telling the bios to boot from HD1)

If I use the cdrom and type:

rescue root=/dev/hdb1 I can boot OK.

I dont want to have to use the install CD-ROM to boot !

I tried making a boot diskette: It took 20 minutes to create a file system and my diskette drive was VERY noisy. The boot diskett did not work either. I tried with another diskette, same thing. Maybe the diskette drive is bad, I never use it anyway.

Is there a way to install debian on my seconde hard drive without having to modify the boot record of my XP install on the first drive ?

Thanks !

Will never work, the XP bootloader is incapable of booting anything else but windows. You will need Grub or Lilo to boot both windows and linux.

A bootdiskette may work, but your drive doesn't seem to be working properly.

I don't think you understood my question
 

I want to install Debian woody on a TOTALLY different hard drive.

I don't need multi-boot capability !

When I need Linux, I will go in my BIOS and tell the computer to boot from the second HD instead of the first.

What happens now, is thaty if I go to the BIOS and I boot off the 2nd HD, nothing happens, no error, just a blank screen.

I will try another diskette drive in my PC.

I also tried installing LILO on the 2nd HD. It sort of booted, but I got a series of 40 40 40 40 40 40 40 40 scrolling forever.

Maybe I needed to create a /boot partition on the disk ?

All I understand is that you want to boot the second harddrive whilst there is no information what so ever on the first master drive. That is not possible to my knowledge and could be called a hardware limitation. Booting off the second hard drive doesn't mean the system ignores the existence of the master drive. I would be happy to learn other possibilities, because a 1024 cilinder limitation related to booting linux comes to mind, but I'm not sure about the details of this.

Still, a bootflop should work since linux can be booted from any logical partition.

Maybe someone else does understand your question. Good luck with your efforts ;)