Installing Slack on a slave HD with XP on master one.
 

Hi guys ! I have Windows XP installed on my master harddisk but now i want to install the Slackware Linux on my slave HD and just don't know how to do it. And i also need instructions so i can configure my Lilo for booting both systems after i install the Slack.

First of all, do you have room on your hard drive for the partitions you will need for Slackware? edit: just realized you will be installing it on the slave HD, disregard this question :)

Oh, and don't worry about configuring LILO for dual boot, it will do that for you during the installation. You'll just want to set up the partitions/mount points for your Linux installation on hdb, not hda, since hda = primary master and hdb = primary slave.

Here's a funny twist...I am doing the exact OPPOSITE. I have Slack on my Master and XP on my slave. I set it up in Lilo slack on /dev/hda1 and XP on /dev/hdb1 but XP never shows up in Lilo. My jumpers are set as 40gig Master (Linux) and 100gig Slave (XP).

Now, when I had both drives set as Cable Select, XP would show up, but would never boot. It is marked as Bootable.

Any tips to make this work?

Winblows XP I know gets pissy and won't allow itself to be installed anywhere but the physical beginning of a hard drive. Maybe it also won't boot if not on primary master (not sure)? Did you try swapping the hda/hdb entries in your fstab, switching the disks around, and making XP reside on primary master rather than slave?

Well, it's worth a shot...I'll give that a try.

Don't forget!
 

Xp can be an arse to get going. However it is possible i seem to recall doing things like that myself oh so many months ago. However the boot.ini file for winXP must point to the right drive and partition otherwise you will probably get a message like NTDLR is missing or corrupt, I also think that there is a registryentry that must be changed for this to work.

If your set on using Windows XP CRAP edition then reinstall it onto the first partition and then linux on the other. Thats how i have it and its fine. Although i had to mess about with the boot.ini to get linux to boot form the menu.

Hope that helps

Well, my XP hard disc...it is a disc all by itself, not a partition. Is 100gigs in size, and has probably 40gigs free space. I do digital video, so the 60gigs of occupied space are fairly important to me. I'm not looking to experiment like I have been with Slack. I'm looking for solutions. I mean, it's no big deal, I can swap cables and it should work fine. It'd just be a lot more convenient for XP and Slack to boot as is from Lilo without having to crack the case when I needed XP or vice versa.