Dual boot win xp and linux on second hard drive
 

Hello all,
I just bought a 120GB hard drive, and now I am wondering what exactly to do.
I never installed a hard drive before, and want to know exactly all the steps I should take as to not mess anything up, First of all, I have a amd anthlon 2GHz AMI BIOS 1024MB of ram, and a full 80GB hard drive devoted to windows xp (for gaming) now, I want to know what drive I should set as the primary or master, how to dual boot window and linux, which distro to install first and if this will be difficult for a total linux newbie.
Here is the layout of what I want

Hard drive 1 - 80GB windows xp home

Hard drive 2 - 25GB Slackware 10.1
25GB mandriva 2005 LE
25GB Fedora core 4
25GB linspire

maybe a little bit more on each if I can... how much extra space will I need for the swap partition and how do you set this all up?

So, to summerize my questions quickly, How to install a second hard drive, master or slave for XP, Which linux to install first (easyest one... well, besides linspire, duh) how to set up a dual boot, and how difficult this will be, also any other things I should consider.

Thank you for reading.

How desperately do you need xp? If you can't do without it, leave it as master (primary). Save yourself a lot of headaches.

To install the 120G hard drive (I'm assuming ide).

Open the box. The only hard drive is now plugged into the end connector of the ide cable. There is another connector between the HD now there, and the motherboard. That's where you will plug the new HD to make it slave.
Important note: check the decal on the new HD. It shows a diagram of how to set the jumpers for master and slave HD, and only HD. You will need something like tweezers to pluck the jumper on the primary HD and move it according to the diagram to make it existing HD master. The connector end of the HD has a slot with a jumper (probably white). To make that HD master, you will probably have to move it so the pin pattern looks like ::|::. On the new disk, to make it slave, the jumper will have to be moved to make it look like :::|:. That little piece of plastic makes the HDs identify themselves as master and slave.

Double check all connections; make sure they are secure before putting the box back together.

Now, decide which distro will be the master, and which slaves. You should install the master first. I don't use lilo much; I seem to have better luck with grub. Configuring grub to boot a distro with lilo bootloader is easier that the reverse, for me at any rate.

So, let's say you install Mandriva as the master linux distro. Be careful when installing grub. If you say "install to MBR", grub in inteligent enough to find the MBR of the master disk, and you won't be able to boot windows again until you get grub configured to hand-off the boot process to the xp bootloader. (did I mention, you should make a boot floppy or cd for xp before you start all this?)
On the other hand, if you install grub to the root of the Mandriva partition, you won't be able to boot Mandriva without a boot disk/install disk. My suggestion, if you can do without xp for a while, install grub to the MBR and simplify things.

Now Mandriva is installed, and grub is configured (if Mandriva is well-behaved, it also wrote the necessary grub.conf (menu.lst?) entry to be able to boot xp.

Now, what to do about the other distros?

Install each one individually, using whatever bootloader comes with the distro. Important: install the bootloader to the root of the partition you are installing into. Then mount the partition for Mandriva. Open the bootloader config for the newly installed distro. Copy the entries for the new distro to the grub.conf (menu.lst?) on Mandriva, to make a menu entry there in Mandriva's grub screen. If the new distro uses lilo, change the default timeout to zero (in the lilo.conf). You will also have to edit the kernel line of the config to suit grub requirements.

If one of the distros uses lilo as the bootloader, setting the grub is as easy as:
title <distroname>
root (hd1.1) ### or whatever the partition is in grub terminology in which you installed the new distro.
chainloader +1 ### to hand-off the boot process from grub on Mandriva to lilo on another distro.

Changing the timeout in the /etc/lilo.conf to zero will allow grub to hand-off to lilo, and lilo will go directly in boot; you will never see the lilo screen.

Hello again,
Thanks alot :) everything you said worked perfectly. Ill install the other ones later, but for now ill just stick to fedora core 4. .. But now I have another question.. I only made one 100GB partition for fedora, and installed it.. can i now resize it and create new partitions for the other OS(s) ? or will i have to wipe it clean and do that all over again lol.
thanks again.

GREAT Job "bigrigdriver". Any one needs lot of patience to write such a long reply from scratch. Keep it up man.

regards