Right now I have a computer with two hard drives, and FC3 is on the first and the second is unused. I'm planning on doing a Windows install on the second drive sometime in the next few days, but since I'm doing it in a sort of weird way, I wanted to ask if anyone knows if what I am doing will cause any problems. Since Windows wants to be on the first drive, I was thinking of just switching my master/slave drives in my BIOS so that the unused drive is the master drive, and then installing Windows on it. My primary concern is whether Fedora will be ok with this after I get it back up. In particular, right now it thinks it is on hda and the other drive is on hdb, and I'm worried that the system could get confused after I switch the drives in the BIOS. I'm also confused about what GRUB will call the hard drives. In a more general sense, my question has to do with the way that the kernel determines whether it is on the "first" or "second" drive. It seems like there are two ways that Linux could determine which is the "first" hard drive - it could just look at the I/O addresses or there could just be some way of asking the BIOS. But maybe when I switch my master/slave configuration the BIOS changes the I/O addresses. I don't know enough about how the kernel (or my BIOS) works, but I'm guessing that this is implemented in a fairly standard way, so I was hoping someone could help tell me understand what the effects of this will be.

normally it doesn´t matter where your os will be placed.
if you install xp on hd2, it will overwrite your mbr on hd1 and you can not start fc3 via bootmenu.
i would 1st install xp (whereever) and then install fc3. till now i were not in such a situation, but there are many howtos, how to install linux after windoze.
think the following should also work:
-unplug hd1
-install xp on hd2
-plug hd1
-boot into fc3
-edit grub where to find xp
...but never tried ;-)

I've tried something very similar (debian/lilo instead of fc/grub); it works like a charm, except for the I'm-Windows-so-I-MUST-be-on-the-first-disk thing that micro$oft has going.

How to fix it for Lilo:
http://www.anandtech.com/guides/viewfaq.html?i=138
I hope you can learn the trick for grub from this (and, of course, the grub manual).

thread where I was tipped to that site, just in case you care:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...hreadid=200333

hth --Jonas Kölker

you can install xp on the second drive, the only thing M$ do, is changing MBR of disk1.
and the normal boot-files xp need are:
ntdetect.com, ntldr, boot.ini

and due to the fact that boot.ini describes where (drive,partition) xp is installed, an ntfs-formatted floppy with this files satisfies to boot into xp.
so if the ´other OS-entry´ in grub is correct, it should work....

What you're planning is fine - so long as you are prepared to flip-flop the primary drive in the BIOS whenever you want to change O/S. That way each disk has an MBR, and sees itself as primary for that boot.
Not something I'd do, but others have.

If you make your unused drive the (BIOS) primary, windows will install successfully on that disk, and will not affect the MBR of the other disk. It will see the FC3 disk as D:

After that, go back into the BIOS and make the FC3 disk the primary, and it will boot happily. It will see the windows disk as hdb (or sdb if SATA).

Once both are installed, *BOTH* boot-loaders can be used to boot either and/or both, without having to swap the drives in the BIOS. If you choose to use ntldr to do this, it will have to be the primary drive *permanently*, and you'll need to update the FC3 fstab as it (FC3) will now be on /dev/hdb (or sdb if SATA).