I'm thinking of putting a PCI card in my computer that gives me two new spots to hook up IDE cables. Here's a diagram of my situation:

Primary Master: Hard Drive 1
Primary Slave: Hard Drive 2
Secondary Master: DVD-ROM
Secondary Slave: CD-RW

The first two hard drives are Windows XP, and family is making them off-limits to Linux. So I'd have to have Linux on another hard drive. I don't know what this would make it, I'm guessing hde, but I don't know.... So I'm wondering, would it work to have Linux installed soley on that hard drive connected to the PCI card? I would have lilo as my boot manager (Since that's what comes with Slackware), so could it work? Or would I need something on hda (I might be able to have a tiny partition for my /boot if that's necessary, but I really wouldn't want to).

If this would work, I have 2 more questions:
1) What name would the hard drive have? hde? sda?

2) Would I have to compile extra drivers into the kernel to get this to function properly? I wouldn't imagine so, since it would be reading off of that hard drive to load the drivers, but one never knows....

"I'm thinking of putting a PCI card in my computer that gives me two new spots to hook up IDE cables."

I have used a secondary PCI controller for over two years. I highly recommend that you buy a HighPoint controller since it has by far the best Linux support.

"2) Would I have to compile extra drivers into the kernel to get this to function properly? I wouldn't imagine so, since it would be reading off of that hard drive to load the drivers, but one never knows...."

You need the drivers compiled into the kernel. The HighPoint drivers are distributed with the kernel and do not need to be added in a separate operation. This is not true of all IDE controler chipsets.

"The first two hard drives are Windows XP, and family is making them off-limits to Linux. So I'd have to have Linux on another hard drive. I don't know what this would make it, I'm guessing hde, but I don't know.... So I'm wondering, would it work to have Linux installed soley on that hard drive connected to the PCI card? I would have lilo as my boot manager (Since that's what comes with Slackware), so could it work? Or would I need something on hda (I might be able to have a tiny partition for my /boot if that's necessary, but I really wouldn't want to)."

You can put Linux on any drive that you want and it will work OK. The only thing that you have to do to /dev/hda is install the lilo bootloader on the /dev/hda MBR. When you get into the complexities of multi disk configuration I find grub a little easier to work with. I use grub on my MBR and lilo on my boot floppy.

"1) What name would the hard drive have? hde? sda?"

The 4 devices on the secondary controller are:
/dev/hde (primary)
/dev/hdf (secondary)
/dev/hdg (primary)
/dev/hdh (secondary)

For what it is worth, here is my disk configuration:

/dev/hda is 120 Gig Seagate drive
/dev/hda1 is spare1 18G
/dev/hda2 is swap 2G
/dev/hda3 is / 19G
/dev/hda4 is spare2 82G

/dev/hdd is CD-RW
"hdd=ide-scsi"

/dev/hde is 30 Mb Maxtor drive
/dev/hde1 is /makeCD 4G
/dev/hde2 is /home 1G
/dev/hde3 is /backup 10G
/dev/hde4 is spare3 13G

/dev/hdg is 40 Gig Maxtor drive
/dev/hdg1 is spare4 4G
/dev/hdg2 is /usr 9G
/dev/hdg3 is /software 9G
/dev/hdg4 is spare5 14G



___________________________________
Be prepared. Create a LifeBoat CD.
http://users.rcn.com/srstites/LifeBo...home.page.html

Steve Stites

Okay, Windows's Device Manager says that my card is:

Promise Technology Inc. Ultra IDE Controller

Now that i know that the hard drive on the secondary IDE controller would be hde, let me narrow down my question:

Could I have hda and hdb be strictly NTFS for Windows, and not have Linux touch the hard drives (with the exception of LILO on the MBR for hda), and have the system boot into Linux? I'd imagine so, since on my current Linux box I have my / as reiserfs on hdb3 or something like that, I know it's on hdb. But I do have my /boot on that computer as hda1, so that's what's making me unsure about my situation for the newer box.

Summary of my question:

Could I have my / and /boot on hde, lilo on hda's MBR, and have the system boot into Linux? Or would I need at least one linux partition on either hda or hdb?

"Could I have my / and /boot on hde, lilo on hda's MBR, and have the system boot into
Linux? "

Yes.

Also /boot does not have to be a separate partition. There was a time when most BIOS would not support large hard drives properly and /boot had to be at the beginning of the hard drive in order to boot. You no longer have to do that.

___________________________________
Be prepared. Create a LifeBoat CD.
http://users.rcn.com/srstites/LifeBo...home.page.html

Steve Stites

excellent. Well, I think I'm only hours away from getting slackware on a 1.7ghz! This is a MAJOR upgrade from my 200mhz computer. And now I have 2 audio cables in the computer, one for each cd-rom drive, and I can listen to music from the second hard drive when I'm using knoppix (like what I'm doing right now!)

I'm using knoppix at the moment because it's the only way I can view the partitions on the 3rd hard drive. They're all NTFS, so I can't write to them, which isn't a problem. All I need to do is see what's on the partitions, and from what I can see, it's my old primary hard drive, and since everything got copied over to the 80GB from the 40GB, I shouldn't have any problems with my dad)))