Installing on two hard drives
 

I'm a newbie converting to Debian 3.0 stable from Mandrake.

I have two hard drives:

hda = windows
hdb = linux

On the installation, of cfdisk, it asks to select a BOOT when selecting partitions. Where do I select the boot? hda, or hdb? I don't want to lose my Windows boot up. I want to be able to boot up into both. Any hep for a newbie would be great!

if you want to be safe, swap your drives around (if you've not actually installed debian yet) that way you can physically remove the windows drive while you install the bootloader and get linux working. you can then configure the bootloader to prtened that, when booting windows, that it actually is the master after all, using the map-drive command in lilo. this way you nkow for a fact that windows is safe at every step of the way, and removing linux (god forbid) is nothing more complicated that moving the drives back to the old position.

1. When you're partitioning with cfdisk, activate the boot flag on the root partition of the second/slave hard drive (hdb or hdd).

Make sure you are partitioning the right drive, at the top of the screen it should say: cfdisk /dev/hdd or /dev/hdb. If it says: cfdisk /dev/hda, you're partitioning Windows, get outta Dodge.

2. Woody will ask you later on, where do you want GRUB installed, choose the MBR.

When you reboot in the first part of the installation, if Windows does not appear, but Debian does, do not panic, continue with the Debian installation, you can edit the GRUB menu list from Debian once the installation is over.

We can offer advice, but ultimately, you make the decision, and if something breaks, you get to keep both parts. :)

Thanks Macondo!