hi there

i'm planning to install slackware on a windows xp system, but not on the same harddisk but on a second one

my question is: is it possible to connect this second harddisk to the mainboard as the slave harddisk, leaving the master device to the windows harddisk?

will i be able (or will the slackware installer be able) to safely install slackware on the second (slave) hd without losing the data on the windows hd?

and if yes, will i be able to access the data on the windows harddisk (ntfs file system) through slackware?

hope anyone can help, since i found out that quite a many newbie questions are answered here ; )

felix

p.s.: don't know if this is important but i'm going to download the iso file and burn a bootable cd and will install slackware via cd-rom.

In short, yes, yes, and yes.

When you install the hd, make sure the jumpers are set correcly for master and slave.

When you install slackware make sure you set the target partition correctly. B4 you do that you'll run fdisk to set up your partitions. If your XP drive is the master and the linux drive is the slave use:

fdisk /dev/hdb

Then set up your swap and the rest of the partitions.

When you finish installing you can mount the xp partition using:

mount -t ntfs /dev/hda1 /mnt/windows

Thats assuming /mnt/windows exists.

Note: You have some options for the boot manager. I would recommend using a boot floppy. It allows you to keep people from accidentally booting into linux and then not knowing what to do, panicking and hitting the power switch. The floppy would be like a "linux boot key". Just a thought.

sounds good.

how can i verifiy that /mnt/windows exists?

and is it possible first to install slackware while the windows hd is disconnected and the slackware hd is master, and then changing the sw hd to slave and the win hd to master?

Check for /mnt/windows by typing:

ls /mnt

It will return something like:

cdrom/ floppy/ hd/ windows/

If windows is not listed, as root (su -), type:

mkdir /mnt/windows

For the second question, forgive me if I wax philisphical here, you can do anything you want to do. However, using that method would be pretty painful. The slackware hd would be detected as hda and all the partitions would be hda1,hda2... The install would set everything up assuming this. Once you are done installing, and you have both hd's in and set properly you would not be able to boot linux right away. You would need to do the following:

1) Boot linux off the cd and login as root, like you did when you installed it.

2) Mount the linux partition (mount /dev/hdb2 /mnt/hd). You would need to replace hdb2 with whatever the actual linux partition is on the second hd.

3) Go into /etc/fstab and change all the hda's to hdb's

4) Done

The boot floppy you created would have to be redone as well. I think you might be able to specify which partition you want to use when you make the floppy the first time, if not you can go through setup again, specify the correct targets (on hdb), when you select what to install uncheck everything, eventually it will get to the point where it makes the boot floppy at which point your set.

Having said all that, I highly recommend leaving both drives in there during the install and just installing into hdb. There may be other issues I missed. I know you may be concerned about messing up the XP drive. Just make sure you select hdb (if your slack hd is the slave) for fdisk and the target partitions and when you install LILO put it on the floppy. You will be ok.

If you have Slackware 8.1, there is a radme on the first or second CD (I forget which), the instructions there outline the installation procedure pretty well. I have the exact same setup you do. My 40G has XP, my 6G has Linux. No problems. I can access even my XP desktop while in Linux (not the other way though.) The only problem I had in this area was Lilo. That might take some tweaking.

You could also use the bootloader for xp to boot into your linux system.
write the lilo on the / drive instead of MBR.

Then use a program called bootpart in xp to create the file needed for the bootloader to boot your / partition .

In that way you don't have to mess with the MBR every time you reinstall XP.

To set up you partitions on the second drive use the program "cfdisk" it does the same as fdisk but has a better interface, even the fdisk man page recomends it,

is there a prompt at the install process where to install LILO and whether to create a boot floppy?

p.s.: just to know if i get the clue, i can leave the win hd mounting process out during install and care about that when i run linux, correct?

There are prompts and blue ncurses menus that you can toggle between, have a good read of the Slackware-HOWTO.txt, it's on the CD and contains install instructions.

After reading the above, I thought to add my opinion. Yes installing onto the second drive works fine. I have done so, and created the boot disk, the next option is if you want to install LILO, i said, NO. It worked, i can boot into slack, just can't do anything, keyboard and mouse still not working,,,,
Anyway, Could any of you tell me where to find " bootpart", as I cannot find it on a win XP disk, or when I search for it. Since I am multi-booting, or attempting to do so, With 4 or more OS'S. And the truth is, that the 3 times I tried to do this with LILO, I had to reinstall everything, windows(s) and linux(s) and still can't get everything to work.
As for unpluging a drive, It works for me. Since slack, libranet, mandrake, etc,,, look at the IDE connection ID not the device when locating a drive,,,, ex;

IDE0=PRIMARY MASTER ,=hda
IDE1=PRIMARY SLAVE ,=hdb
IDE2=SECONDARY MASTER ,=hdc
IDE3=SECONDARY SLAVE ,=hdd

Mine is setup like so,
IDE0=hda=CD/DVD-ROM
IDE1=EMPTY
IDE2=hdc=CD-RW
IDE3=EMPTY
(ide4-7 on promise controller)
IDE4=hde=40GB fat32
IDE5=hdf=empty
IDE6=hdg=40GB fat32
IDE7=hdh=60GB linux/fat32

kinda overkill on storage, but I do lot of video work on here, and it uses a LOT of space.

Excuse me, I did not explained that bootpart is a program you have to download.

here is it:
http://www.winimage.com/bootpart.htm