I have a 20 gig drive which is my primary drive running w2k. I just purchased a 160gig drive and I have partioned the drive so that half is for windows and the other I want to install RH9. How do I install RH9 so that I can choose which OS I want to boot with.

Thanks,
Rhsam

i'm a little confused about what you say you want to do, but if i'm reading you right, the easiest way probably would be to install RH on the first half of the 160GB as a slave drive, and set up the bootloader (Grub or LILO) on the MBR of your master w2k drive.

Sorry about that. Yes I would like to install RH9 on the blank side of the 160gig drive. The last time I tried to create a dual boot box I was never able to get it to work. Since this is my home machine I need to be a little more careful. I will try your recommendation tomorrow.

Thanks

Will the same thing work for Mandrake 9.1?
I'm running a machine with XP Home on my 120 GB main HD, and i hav e a 40gig HD with 1 partition, and the rest empty i want to put Mandrake on. I tried doing something like this before, with a slightly different set up, and when it tired to boot i got a black screen with a bunch of 07 07 07 07 07 07. Since then I've been afraid to try again.

the same thing will work with any linux.

i have 120GB HD with w2k on hda1, and a 40GB maxtor drive as slave with slackware on hdb1. works fine. i've also had RH on hdb1 and slackware on another partition. also worked fine. using generic setups like that (win on hda master, lin on hdb slave) you just have set up the boot loader in the MBR of your windows drive.

I think the best thign to do would be to use the larger hard drives as your Windows hard disks and then use the small 20 or 40 gb as your linux partition. Why waste a good 80GB of a 160gb drive on linux which only uses like 10gb at most. It makes no sense jsut use the small hard disks as your linux partitions and your large ones for windows.

If you do want to do it the way u said. Then jst get a program called System Commander 7. It's amazingly good. It also has a partitioning utility which does everything that partition magic does but included with the program. It's really a goo program. Check it out. It's called System Commander 7

If you have 2 disks, the way to organize things with paritions is as follows


disk 1) windoze C + / + /boot + /usr + /tmp

disk 2) windoze D + /usr/lib + /usr/local + /usr/share + /usr/X11R6 /var /home

/usr/lib should not be on the same disk as /usr for better performance

Depending on the space on the disk, you may have to move /home and or /usr/local to disk 1.

Read the Multi-Disk-HOWTO to learn more.

the way i read it, rhsam only wanted to install RH on the 160GB, and keep the rest of the drive for a windows partition to use for storage, etc., not install another windows OS on the 160GB. but as i said, it was a little unclear as to what s/he wanted to do, could you clarify it rhsam.

Well, I installed mine on my XP machine, I almost had a catastrophe... when i booted the first time it I got the 07 error again.. so i called dell tech support (since my comp is a Dell). After being on hold several times and dealing with a few morons, i finally got a guy that told me how to fix it. Basially my BIOS wasn't set to recognize my second HDD as the primary Slave... oops.

To Clarify my post above

win C - Put your Windoze system (98/Me/XP) here

win D - Install your Windoze application software (MS Office, DVD players. games, TMP, browser cache, etc etc here, AND your swap file)

And wut about Linux then. He wants to use Linux. You havent specified where to put Linux???

KrazyKid

disk 1) windoze C + / + /boot + /usr + /tmp

disk 2) windoze D + /usr/lib + /usr/local + /usr/share + /usr/X11R6 /var /home

Where do you think /boot /usr /usr/lib /usr/local etc come from?

i haven't read the multi-boot HOWTO, but it seems to me if you span your OSes that way (over multiple partitions) and your hardrives are on the same IDE channel, you've just effectively reduced your throughput in a lot of cases by half. if you have 2 hard drives, what is wrong with keeping each OS on its own HD?

I want to first start with the fact that I got it to work! To better explain what I was trying to do let me first describe my environment. I have one home pc that I have been running w2k for years. I first wanted expand my disk space so I could edit some videos, so I went out and bought a 160 gig drive because it was to cheap to pass up. Well I have a laptop that I switch hard drives out between Linux and Windows and I wanted to do the same on my home machine so I could mess around with it, but I could not erase my W2K partition since my wife uses the machine as well.

To get over this I decided to use 100 gigs for the W2K partition and 60gig for the linux side. My fear was that I could damage my original 20gig drive holding the Windows OS trying to make it dual bootable. I have done this with a previous version of RH on my laptop. Which is why I am now switching drives back and forth.

So before I made the plung I wanted to see if there were any tricks that I should be aware of before proceeding. Basically the installer for RH9 handled everything and it works perfectly. The reason I wanted 60gigs for linux was because I could and I am a J2EE developer working with WebLogic and WebSphere and if any of you have worked with IBM software you know it eats a ton of space ;-)

Thanks again for your help,
Rhsam