I downloaded Mandrake 10.0 Official, currently I'm using Windows XP. I'm not too familiar with the whole hda, hdb1, etc etc stuff... I'm simply used to C:, D:, E:, F:, etc, and previously I've always installed Mandrake from a CD.

I'm installing Mandrake from my hard drive though. Currently it's located in E:\i586\. I visited qa.mandrakesoft.com/hd_grub.cgi to setup the menu.1st file to go along with the hd_grub.img on the floppy.

Now, I look on that webpage and see: xxx BIOS hard drive, xxx IDE hard drive, xxx partition.

I know it's on the primary partition on that drive, but the BIOS and IDE blanks throw me into a world of confusion. In the Computer Management part of XP, it lists the drive as disk 1. I've got three hard drives, and I'm pretty sure all three are plugged into a PCI ATA100 controller. It's been so long since I've upgraded my computer that I can't even remember which hard drive is which and all physically, and don't care to dig around in the clutter I call a computer and find out.

Someone help me out. Is there just some utility I can download that can make the menu.1st file automatically by me just clicking on the folder where it's located in Windows, or at least a program to identify to me what my hard drive is called in linux terms? (the hda1 etc stuff)

Please help, I'm ready to reboot and install right now I just need to get this right, I'd hate to erase my Windows partition and have the file messed and not be able to install.

well u gotta first understand the /dev/hd* bit. its not that hard:

/dev/hd(a-z) - would be all the harddrives installed in ur machine. realistically you can only have 4 IDE harddrives maximum on a standard pc

/dev/hdx(#) - would be the partition you have on /dev/hdx

so, if i have a primary master drive with windows XP installed on it and a primary slave harddrive that has linux installed on it, my XP drive would be /dev/hda, and my NTFS partition would be on /dev/hda1. my linux drive would be /dev/hdb and my partitions would be listed as /dev/hdb1, /dev/hdb2, /dev/hdb3 and so on.



now grub handles the harddrives differently. /dev/hda1 would be called (hd0,0). grub starts counting from 0. the first 0 represents the first harddrive on the machine. 0 represents the first partition. so again in my setup, if i wanted to boot my /boot partition on /dev/hdb1, i would add this to my config

root (hd1,0).

be aware that grub only counts harddrives, no CDs or other medias.

Futhermore,
The drive where the image resides needs to be a FAT32 partition not NTFS. The installer should configure grub to boot both XP and linux so you shouldn't have to do a thing ( in theory ).

hda - 1st IDE controller master
hdb - 1st IDE controller slave
hdc - 2nd IDE controller master
hdd - 2nd IDE controller slave
hde - 3rd IDE controller master (built in or PCI)
hdf - 3rd IDE controller slave
etc.. etc..

The only thing different between the CD install and a hard drive install is you need to create a boot floppy using the hd.img and you need to know image is located on the hard drive.

And remember that Mandrake will "prefer" lilo to grub when it installs. What are you doing? Are you gonna boot linux from a floppy?