dual boot on dual hdds
 

I used a 120 gig harddrive for my windows XP Pro and linux before (windows being hda1 and linux hda2-hda4) with dual boot before using Lilo, and everything worked fine. Now I decided to add a 30 gig hardrive from my old pc so I could have linux and windows each having a separate harddrive. So I put the 120 gig harddrive as primary slave and the 30 gig one as primary master. I want to install linux on the 30 gig one and keep windows on 120 gig one (and use partitionmagic or somehting to remove old linux partitions from the 120 gig harddrive later on). Since I put my 120 gig harddrive as slave, it now became hdb instead of hda (but that shouldn't effect windows, right?).
I added these lines to my Lilo so it can boot up windows:
other = /dev/hdb1 (since my windows is now on hdb1 instead of hda1)
table = /dev/hdb
label = Windows_XP
And tried booting up windows through Lilo (Lilo is on hda) this gave some message for a millisecond (obviously I didn't have time to read it in 1 millisecond) and then went back to the Lilo with the Timer (until default Linux partition is picked) reset back to the beginning time.
I tried getting rid of the table=/dev/hdb part but that still had same results. Then I tried changing it to table=/dev/hda and rebooted it and tried starting up Windows again and after I selected windows it said "Loading Windows_XP" (Windows_XP is the label for that partition) but after that it didn't do anything, just kept displaying that "Loading Windows_XP" message, and I waited for at least 5 minutes. And yes, after every single time I added changes to my lilo.conf I ran "lilo" command as root. I have no clue what's wrong, maybe windows needs to be on a master harddrive, not slave one. Could someone help me on getting windows to boot up. Thanks.

You either have to spoof XP into believing it's Primary Master (it will not tolerate insolence :D It has to be first on the device list) OR actually move it there. You don't have to have Linux on Primary Master to install it, if that's your concern. However, let's go with what we've got...

To trick XP into believe it's actually Primary Master, under the entry in LILO for XP, add these lines:
Save, rerun lilo:
/sbin/lilo -v

And try again.

Cool

Windows boots up fine now but for some reason after it loads everything (like AIM etc.) it just reboots without any warning. And its not the "Windows is shutting down" type of reboot, its as if I hit the reset button on my case. Any idea what's doing this? Thanks.

Try going into rescue mode and running a disk check (scan disk) to see if there are any problems. Do you have any off the wall partitions setup on that thing?

Cool

the easyiest way to remove the linux partition from your 120 gb hardrive it's to open linux install and then remove the partition like you do them, and i have done that, i have one 120 gb hardrive and one 80 gb harddrive, and i'm using 40 gb from the 80 gb to linux. it's faster to use linux on a separate disk, and windows on a other one. use ntfs format and you can use the diskspace in buth OS