Hello,

I would like to install linux on my system consisting of a 120gb sata and two smaller parallel h.d,

Luckily, I don't need to put linux on the sata drive, which currently is running windows, since I guess this is not supported yet...?

But, I would like to put linux on one of the other hard drives and have a boot loader prompt me at startup which os to use.

I don't know whether this is possible, can the boot loader see sata (and ntfs)?, or how I should do this. The redhat linux installation just hangs quite quickly.


Thank you,
Wilfred

If the bios can use & boot from sata, then the bootloader can. Since the bios can't 'see' ntfs, there's no guarantee the bootloader can load things from there (you won't need to anyways, the Linux stuff should be on the Linux partitions). So the problem isn't with the bootloader, it's with Linux hanging because of the sata.

Welcome to LQ! I think that sata will be supported when kernel 2.6.1 comes out if you want linux to see it. Grub should not have a problem with ntfs or sata

I found a beta version of linux called fedora that seems to handle alot of my installation problems more smoothly. I can actually get to the part where you push the big red button that says ready to install.

How can I configure grub to boot the sata drive? As the menu installer on the linux/anaconda/fedura installer for grub, the hard drive can not be seen. (I can fiddle with the bios to make it appear, but then windows won't boot (makes that drive a third in a list which windows doesn't like))

I am pretty sure I can install this fedora on the pata drives, and then should I try and configure grub inside of a working installation?

yet another thanks

yo yo yo....

this might seem odd, but check this out:

gentoo installation manual

it's for the gentoo distro, which i use and is absolutely ace (if time consuming to compile stuff). At the very end of the manual is a section on how to configure grub or lilo to boot from a sata drive. modify the info to install it to the ide drive, and set up the linux stuff as usual, but when it comes to setting up windows use /dev/ataraid/dXpY where x is the drive and y the partition.

that's the theory anyhow - i haven't managed to get sata to work properly on my system for one reason or another (ie the onboard sata is crap, i cant boot from my pci sata controller due to crap bios on motherboard and i would rather USE the machine than spend eternity fixing it).

hope that helps...

So why my Mandrake 9.2 doesn't recognize my SATA disk?

It gives me a message wth my hardware?!?! But it works with winXP!

Jose