Windows 2000 Pro came installed on 1st hard drive.
To make a dual booting system, I
reformatted 2nd hard disk as FAT32 (to get rid of
previous installation of RH 7.3) and installed RH
8.0 Pro on it (told automatic partition program
to remove all partitions on E. All works well except that booting up Windows 2000
is very slow. Windows sees the 2nd disk (E and seems
to be having trouble dealing with it. I can make
Windows 2000 boot up with normal speed if I disable
E: disk in Windows Device Manager, but this screwed
up my GRUB boot loader so now I can only boot Linux
from floppy (on disk, GRUB hangs on a screen which
has only text "GRUB " on it).

I would like a cleaner solution to the slow Windows
boot than constantly disabling and enabling E:.
Can someone tell me how to reformat E: so that
Windows correctly ignores it when I re-install
RH 8.0?

Also, what is the procedure for setting up GRUB without
using the RH installation program? And am I right
in not putting GRUB in MBR?

Windows is looking for a compatible file system on E: and not finding one. The easiest solution I've seen is to put a small FAT32 partition at the beginning of the disk--I think 25MB is what someone used. This will give Windows something to match against E:\ and fix your problem.

Please note that it must be the first partition on the disk. Putting it anywhere else will cause Windows to not be able to find it, continuing your problem.

Since you don't seem to have much invested in your Linux setup, it might be easiest to start over. Let Windows partition your second drive, then tell Linux to install on the second partition.

I can't help you with Grub--on dual boot computers, I put it in the MBR and have not found a reason to do otherwise.

Thanks deadbug,

Making the 1st partition of the 2nd drive (E
a small FAT32 one to satisfy Windows sounds
reasonable. However, I am surprised that Windows
requires this work-around! and that RedHat does
not mention this very important problem and
solution!