installing on separate drives/dual booting
 

I have three hard drives installed in my pc (A, B, C). Drive A has nothing on it, drive B has Win2K installed and drive C is just a data drive (i.e. drive "D" in windows). I tried installed RH 7.3 on drive A and created a boot disk. When I boot up without the disk in it just boots windows and can't see the linux install. When I try to boot off of the boot disk it can't find the boot image either and just leaves me at boot: . any ideas how to fix this?

Well first, since you have 3 drives, are they installed on UDMA high speed ports or regular IDE?

I have had cases where the install on a UDMA works, but I cant boot to it becuase that driver does not load.

the drive I installed linux on (Drive A) is regular ide. Drives B and C are UDMA.

If you are getting this message before the Linux kernel loads (The kernel will spit out pages and pages of messages on the screen as it starts up) then it sounds like your boot disk might have errors. These boot disk creation programs require a 100% perfect floppy disk, and won't give you much of a warning if you try to use one that isn't. Try making another one.

I'm not up on RH these days, but you might have better luck booting from your RH install cdrom, then issuing an "linux root=/dev/hda1" at the boot prompt to boot right into your drive "a" partition "1", or where ever you installed your root filesystem.

Of course, you eventually should learn how to install and use one of the Linux bootloaders (lilo or grub), but you need to be real careful with these things!

You can also use "loadlin" from a "DOS mode" windows prompt. It goes something like this: "C:\> loadlin vmlinuz initrd=ramdisk" and assumes you've got your kernel "vmlinuz" and your initial ramdisk "ramdisk" (if needed) copied to your Windows C:\ drive.