Hi,

I am in the middle of installing Red Hat 9 onto my 2nd 4.1 GB hard disc (configured as primary slave: /dev/hdb)

The primary master (/dev/hda) is an 80 GB hard disc
having windows xp.

The boot loader configuration screen says that the the grub boot loader will be installed in /dev/hda...(i.e. on the MBR which is supposedly in the primary master hard disk having windows xp)...

Am I correct to assume that the BIOS has to be set up so that the system boots from the primary master ?

I am also worried whether loading GRUB onto the MBR in the /dev/hda (primary master) would lead to any complications in booting the windows xp and also in future reinsallations, if any, of windows xp in the primary master
or of red hat 9 in the primary slave..

Do I need to take any precautions like disabling the system restore in windows xp etc

I was going through some old posts and wondering whether it would be better to boot to 2 different operating systems in the 2 hard disks by changing the hard disk priority in the BIOS..But then I don't know where to
place the boot loader in that case during installation?

I will be thankful for any help whatsoever...

You won't have to worry about grub and windows xp. As long as you specify that you want to have windows xp able to load it will load it instead of just linux.

No you don't need to take any precautions for that. The only thing you want to do is make sure to create a boot disk during the installation in case you loose windows xp and have to reinstall it.

Yes, just make sure you install GRUB to the MBR of the 1st hard drive ( your Windows dirve) and make sure the BIOS points to it so it can find the bootloader.

There are rescue options if your not happy in future with the dual boot - both from the XP side and the Red Hat side - I wouldnt worry too much - if you've got something vital on your XP drive then back it up first.

i just did this and had no probs... rh9 installer automatically looked after it... even if it does insist on calling Windows XP, DOS (it just sees dos not the OS)

Only prob you get is if you reinstall windows it will trash the grub bootloader, and i also delete my linux partition from windows once by mistake... (had to do the old fdisk /mbr trick to get into windows )

from last time i installed i learnt one thing... Linux installs dont seem to go out of there way to trash windows booting, they look for it, they help you... Windows installs (or invariably re-installs) dont even bother looking for linux, hence the need for the dratted boot disk...

On a seperate note, prior to installing I saw messages dissing grub and suggesting LILO as the Boot manager to use...

is there actually any massive difference... ?

One difference is simply that each time you make any changes to lilo.conf you have to run /sbin/lilo again to reinstall the bootloader and new map file, whereas with GRUB this is not the case - so there are differences but they're not massive and you can certainly get by quite happily with LILO. I actually prefer LILO but others vouch for GRUB.