I am sure that there have been hunderds (maybe thousands) of times that people have asked about setting up dual boot systems. I understand the idea of how to do it if your using just one HD, however I have a second drive installed in my system (as slave on primary IDE cable) and just need to know if the idea is the same.

I am trying to install Red Hat 7.3 and just need to know if when I put the bootable CD in will it ask where I want it to go from the beginning? If not from the beginning, then where will it start installing until it does ask?


Sorry to sound like such an idiot.

I do really want to learn this OS, and I will probably be back to ask more questions as time goes on.

it will ask you about it during HDD partition. As for dual boot, you are right there're hundreds of posts like this, for instance http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...ight=dual+boot

I am also new to Linux and don't know a heck of a lot about computers. I installed SuSE 8.0 on my system to dual boot with Windows ME. Before I did the install I installed a second hard drive as slave on the primary IDE cable. I formatted the new hard drive before installing linux but that wasn't necessary, linux will re format it and partition it as part of the process of installation.

With SuSE it was about as easy as it can get. I wanted to install Linux on the second hard drive. SuSE figured out my existing partitions (I had my primary HDD partitioned as one big drive, C) and made the recommendation that I re partition the primary HDD and install Linux on that . I chose not to do that and selected the button to change the default. It then offered me a few more possibilities, one of which was to partition and install the linux software on the second HDD. I chose that option with the LiLo (Linux Loader) installed in the master boot record (MBR) on the primary drive. That way, with the BIOS set to boot the computer from the primary hard drive, it will pop up the LILO dialog box after it posts and you can select the operating system you want to load.

I am not experienced with Red Hat but it should be simular. It is easier to do than it is to explain it. On my system it installed with absolutely no problems, it was actually easier than installing Windows. Linux uses slightly different terminolgy for the hard drives calling the primary hda if it is an IDE drive, and hdb for the secondary. Then it will refer to the partitions numerically as hda1, hda2, hdb1, hdb2, etc.

Hope this helps. Others here are much more knowlegable and can tell you more.

Use the DiskDruid programme during the RedHat setup to take care of partitioning and formatting.

Linux uses a different notation for drive letters so you will see
partitions on your primary IDE referred to as hda1, etc and partitions on your secondary IDE will be hdb1, etc.

If you are installing to the secondary IDE (which is usually safer than messing around with partitions on your primary IDE) the master boot record of the primary IDE (hda1) will be overwritten with the Linux Bootloader (either LILO or GRUB). This is where you can get a problem as when I installed RedHat 7.2 the implementation of both bootloaders was poor. Whilst my Windows system was identified on the new boot menu it was not possible to boot into Windows at all and the machine just hung. However it was possible to boot into RedHat so I suppose that is one way of converting people to Linux!

I then tried Mandrake and the bootloader was installed okay. Since then no problems booting into either Windows or Linux.

Alan

It seems that the penguin and I are not getting along, I am trying to install RH 7.3, but I can't get it to recognize my keyboard. The keyboard I have is a USB that came with the system, there is an option for the Compaq internet keyboard, but when I select it the keyboard doesn't work. Any suggestions?

BTW the only way I could get the USB mouse to work was to use a ps/2 adapter that came with it.

Unfortunately I don't know enough about RedHat to advise you.
I could say "try Mandrake" but that may not be what you want to hear!

Incidentally I did have another strange problem with RedHat 7.2 whereby it refused to recognise my ISA modem even though I followed exactly the same setting-up procedure in KDE as I did for Mandrake (which worked). After taking advice from more experienced users I messed around with the setserial command but this made no difference. Rightly or wrongly I came to the conclusion that Mandrake is better at recognising and setting-up your hardware.

Alan

USB keyboard issue...

You may have to recompile your kernel, to gain support for your keyboard. I haven't ever used a USB keyboard, but do have to configure my USB mouse by recompiling my kernel. Maybe try switching the adapter over to the keyboard, since it would seem that you would really want support from the keyboard to get anything rolling.

HTH

Alan:

I've been reading up on this issue and it's been recommended to install lilo on the root partition instead of the MBR, then boot with a floppy and edit lilo.conf to add the windows os to the boot menu.

Are you saying that with Mandrake you just installed LILO to the MBR and it automatically picked up the win hd as an option with the correct location?

Thanks.

You can install LILO on the root partition but it is more complicated and you need to know what you are doing! As I understand it you have to make a boot floppy during the installation, boot into Linux, then modify the LILO configuration file. Then you have to run /sbin/lilo to write the changes.

By default the Mandrake installer will write LILO to the MBR of your primary IDE hard drive. It will then add any other operating systems it finds on the active partition of your primary and secondary HD hard drives.

So as an example... before installing Linux I already had WinXP on my primary IDE and Win98 on my secondary IDE. When I installed Mandrake into some free space on my primary IDE drive it added both versions of Windows to it's boot menu, thus allowing a triple boot option.

Its a good system and I can easily boot into any OS. The good thing about having LILO in the MBR is that it is all done for you automatically and you don't need to be a techie to set it up. If you ever need to get rid of LILO from the MBR as a last resort you can boot off a Win98 startup disk and type in... fdisk /mbr

But not every linux installer makes a good job of installing LILO into the MBR and there are stories going around of some people who hosed their MBR when it all went wrong. I don't think you will have this problem with a major distro like Mandrake or Redhat but I am not sure about some of the other ones.

Best wishes,
Alan