Hi I am using my Asus eepc 900 and it's advertised as having a 20GB drive. When I go in to partition it-- it sees the drive as two separate physical drives (the names have different trailing letters : they were like hda and hdc or something) One of them is 4BG drive, while the other is 16GB. When I look in the bios--it sees two drives as well.

Can I install linux to the larger(16GB) drive and have it run or will it always want to boot off of the smaller drive(4GB)? Can I make them treated as one drive (like it actually is)? If not how do I set up grub to boot from the bigger one?
Thanks!

The Eee PC 900 actually comes with two solid state drives 4 GB + 16 GB (PCIe).
The Bios may allow you to select which to boot from.
If not you can install a small /boot partition on the small drive and / on the large drive.

This looks like a good resource for Eee PC.
http://wiki.eeeuser.com/

lcole: Thanks very much! You are right there are actually two different physical drives in my 900 series Eeepc. That wiki was a great resource as well.
I ended up being able to partition my drives using a live gentoo partitioner cd called Gparted--which is great btw. I then was able to run a live linux distro by booting from an sd card. I then installed that distro to the hard disks using the smaller 4G drive as my boot partition and the larger 16G drive as my swap and / partitions.
Thanks again!

Just as a somewhat late follow up for anyone who faces a similar issue in the future; 4GB is a lot of wasted space for a /boot partition. /boot generally only needs a few hundred megabytes, maybe less depending on your setup.

The least wasteful thing to do in that situation would be to create a RAID0 array, and then have the / partition stretching across both disks.

If that seems daunting, a more efficient setup still would be to use the 4gb disk as swap space, and the other disk for your filesystem partition[s].

Cheers,
Elijah

ewolf: I completely agree that a 4GB boot partition is a waste of space.

I tried every way I could think of to boot from the bigger drive and make the 4GB drive my swap-- I couldn't get it to boot off of the larger drive.
I went in the bios and set up every option I could find to enable this but didn't have any luck with it. If someone has success booting off of the larger drive please share how it is accomplished.

I have a 4gb Eee 701, without the secondary drive, but I have booted from the SD card slot using an 8gb SD card. If you tap ESC when booting, you'll see the boot menu. On my Eee, there are settings in the BIOS for the boot order.

If that doesn't work, you should still be able to install GRUB on the MBR of the 4gb swap-partitioned disk. So you would in effect boot a copy of Linux located on your 16gb disk, using a bootloader on the mbr of your 4gb disk. This wouldn't affect the swap space, since the swap is just another partition, and there's no reason a bootloader needs to be located on the same disk it is loading its kernel & filesystems from.

However, my knowledge of grub installation and configuration doesn't extend as far as knowing exactly how to do this. Hopefully someone with more expertise can provide insight. Or, you could try googling for things like "multiboot grub" or "multiple disk grub".

Cheers,
Elijah

You could always reinstall and use LVM to span the drives if you really insist on just having one big drive.

Since you only need about 250MB for /boot you could also put a 2GB Swap on the small drive.
The remainder could be used for a /home or backup partition that would preserve some settings, scripts and small text files.
Then if you re-install dont write over /home...