Here goes:

I am totally revamping my PC. At first I was going to try and do a tri-operating system setup with xp pro on HDD#1, and Vista and SUSE 10.1 on HDD#2.

I've decided now to put Vista on HDD#1, and SUSE 10.1 on HDD#2.

I installed Vista on #1, and then went to install SUSE. For some reason, GRUB or the Linux installation did not recognize Windows on the other hard drive~~ and there was no option in grub to go to the windows bootloader, and no mounted "windows" folder in the root directory in linux. So, I was locked out of Windows.

After some frustration, I'm now in a new Vista installation on HDD#1 with a completely unformatted/unallocated HDD#2.

I would like to know how I can install SUSE on HDD#2, so that I have the option to boot Windows from GRUB (or Lilo, or whatever works) and can see the Windows "folder" (the other hard drive) in linux.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Another problem.....I've just found out that the "blank" hard drive is formatted to ntfs...would I have to clear it before installing Linux again?

Success!

I have a few things to report, for anyone that is interested.

When Vista sees two empty drives upon install, it hijacks the one that you want to leave empty, formatting it as NTFS and putting some boot log file on it.

solution: unplug HDD#2 from mobo when installing Vista.


Vista is very unfriendly towards grub.

solution: how to:dual boot Vista and Linux

What I did differed from what was listed there: for some reason, my SATA drives are not recognized as sd*/* drives, but rather hd*/* drives. Strange.

I need to sleep. This Linux noob took a whole friggin' weekend to set up a dual boot Vista/Linux PC, but it's finally done!!!

Lol-it is funny to see a whole thread in which a person answers his own question.

Sooooooooo..........

What you're saying is Windows is dominant in more ways than one....

Windows steals hard drives.

It's a conspiracy