A linux booting issue.

wolfe bane · 02-15-2006, 12:35 PM

I have a 120gb SATA hd with windows xp on it and while cleaning up my room i found a spare 75gb IDE hd so i decided to load slackware 10.2. The only problem that I am having is that if I load it how will my pc boot? I know back when I had 2 IDE hd's i would just get lilo to let me choose which i want to boot into. But I am not sure if lilo can see my SATA HD. Can you guys help me out here?

uteck · 02-15-2006, 01:46 PM

It should see it as a scsi device with no problem. Depending on the mobo, it will most likely boot off the IDE drive first.

wolfe bane · 02-15-2006, 11:04 PM

Big problem because i loaded windows on my SATA drive first when i boot my machine it doesnt even check my IDE that has slackware 10.2 on it. Even when its on Master Primary. Any ideas how to get it to work?

pixellany · 02-16-2006, 09:19 AM

First, check the BIOS for boot order of the drives.

The BIOS will go to the MBR of the first hard drive and look for a bootloader. Or, if set to boot from floppy, it will look there first---then the hd.

The bootloader can be configured to boot all of the OSes on the system. Typically, with Windows already installed, you would install Linux and--in the process-- have the installer put the bootloader somewhere. (Did this happen when you installed SUSE?)

wolfe bane · 02-16-2006, 02:00 PM

I figured it out i didnt flag my linux HD to be bootable.