ok i installed FC4 on the secondary hard drive of my pc
when i restarted it loads windows xp as if linux was never installed
when i was installing i chose to keep windows as the default OS but now i cant figur out how to start up linux

so simplified:
I have windows xp installed on C
I install linux on D
It doesnt give me the option to boot linux and goes strait to windows

I'm guessing you installed the bootloader on the second drive, while keeping the bios set to the first drive as active.

Samsara
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So you can either set the bios to boot from the second drive, or you can make sure the bootloader is on the first drive. I'll assume you are using grub, not that it matters much.

You'll need to boot a live cd, mount your linux partitions hierarchically and "chroot" to the linux root partition ("man chroot" tells you more). You then run grub and tell it to install on hd(1). (I'm assuming that your second hard drive is slave on the first channel. If you have a CD ROM drive, this will be the case 99.9%.) I suspect grub will provide enough help to allow you to figure out how to do this, otherwise there are resources on the web.

Samsara
.