I have Dell X300 laptop and have recently bought a second hard drive. My plan is to keep the WIndow XP installation on the primary hard drive intact and install Redhat 9.0 on the second hard drive. The second hard drive is a USB device. The good thing about the X300 is that USB driver is automatically loaded when booting so I can boot into linux installation process with an external USB cdrom. However, when I proceeded into making partitions manually, disk druid only found the primary hard drive but not the USB hard drive.

Another piece of information: When I looked at the BIOS, both hard drives are listed under hard disk.

Do you know why the USB hard drive is not recognized by disk druid? Do I have to mount the drive first? (I don't know how to do it)

Thanks a lot for your help.

Zhong

USB devices may be bootable by your bios, but that doesn't mean that linux can see them once it loads. In linux, an external usb hard drive needs certain scsi and usb modules to be loaded before the device will be detected. RH's installation kernel is not loading these modules I suspect. Search the board, and I think you'll find several posts on the problems encountered when trying to install linux on an external usb hard drive.