Greetings people, Could you please give a newbie a helping hand? What is the best way to get linux installed on a second hdd? Any help would be really appreciated. Thank you very much.

do you wanna install windows on the first HDD and linux on the second HDD? if yes: step 1: install your windows on the first HDD. step 2: install linux on your second HDD, when installing linux(redhat,suse,mandrake,or most linux) it will ask you if you wanna install any bootloader, and you may select GRUB or LILO, then you continue your installation. step 3: after installation, it will reboot your computer, then you will be prompted whether to boot into linux or windows. DONE... Hope this can help! Cheers, dave

sometimes as in my case everytime i have installed redhat with grub the loader only shows linux if this is the case and would like to get back your windows install boot up with a boot disk then fdisk /mbr and reboot and your windows installation should boot

A little more specific, first install windows, then install linux. during install, you will be asked where you want to install linux. Choose hdb1 (or if you have a scsi-drive, its something with sd...) do not choose hda, that's your first harddisk. The thing about the fact that redhat doesn't add windows to it's bootloader can be solved in this way: open /etc/lilo.conf in an editor. at the end, add this: other=/dev/hda1 label="windows" other=/dev/fd0 label="floppy" unsafe the last 3 lines are not needed, but they add a floppy-option to the bootloader so that you don't have to go into the bios all the time. if you want windows to be the default OS to load, change or add this line: default=windows save lilo.conf open a terminal if you're in X type "lilo" (without the quotes) it should show something like Added linux Added windows * Added floppy if it doesn't give any errors, all should be fine and you should be able to boot both windows and linux! Hope this helped. Johan

Hello, I'm in a similiar situation where I've installed Red Hat 8.0 on a second HD (ie. hdb) and Win XP resides on my MASTER HD. Now, the problem I'm having is that after installing Red hat and setting up a boot loader when I turn on the PC it boots directly into windows, without even a boot option screen... i've checked the timeout line in lilo.conf and that's fine (i.e. not zero) - i'm not sure why it boots directly into windows??/ any suggestions??? thanx.

Ya, just figured out what was happening it's kinda silly actually... Red hat was detecting another old Windows partiotion i had on my third HD, I thought it would detect my MASTER HD but it didn't... when I payed close attention to which HD was being detected at startup - I re-installed and changed the detection process manually in the installation... works now. thanx for all the replies.