Dual boot with two SATA-II drives
 

Planning to install SUSE 10.1 on a new computer with 2 SATA II HDDs with XP already installed. HDD-1 has XP on partition-1 with NTFS and partition-2 is FAT32 containing all the apps and data. HDD-2 is where I am planning to install Linux with RieserFS with 3 paritions: /,/home and swap. Any possible problems or special considerations to take into account? Recomendations for partition sizes would be helpful as well. Muchas gracias.

Specs:
CPU: INTEL PENTIUM-D 920 2.8GHz
MOBO: Gigabyte GA-81945P Pro
HDD(2): MAXTOR SATA II 250GB
GRAPHICS: GeCube RADEON X550 256MB PCIx16
RAM: KINGSTON DDR II 1GB 566
PSP: ANTEC TrueBlue 480W

The only area of concern would be the bootloader. You are installing linux on the second SATA drive, but to boot into it, you'll need to let the bootloader (grub most likely) be installed on the first drive. It will give you the option of booting into linux or windows, but if it isn't on the main drive, every boot will result in windows being loaded. The only way around that is either to install the bootloader onto a floppy or bootable CDRom, or use the BIOS to select which drive is booted from. Those are all pains-in-the-ass to me, so I'd just let the install place the bootloader on the start of the first drive.

Peace,
JimBass

You can choose a different drive to be first drive (therefore its MBR) so you can do these

1 no drive change in bios and change your boot.ini file to chainload to grub on a different MBR as per my tut.

2 use a usb or floppy to boot into linux as suggested by Jim

3 change bios boot order ....install linux on new first drive with grub in MBR and as per tut chainload to MS


lots of choices but so little time eh?