Hi, im a newbie at this. I have recently acquired a second harddrive which is formated, and partitioned with windows(v?). My present machine has XPpro installed. I would like to set-up a dual boot putting Linux on the new harddrive and keeping XPpro on the present one. Is there a relatively simple way to do this?

Plug in the second hard drive to your computer. Go in your bios and tell it the first place it should look for boot instructions is the CD drive. Put your Linux CD in the drive and reboot. An installation program should come up, and just follow the simple instructions. If you only have the 2 harddrives, your first hd will be /dev/hda and your second will be /dev/hdb. The Linux installer should set it up so that when you boot, you get a menu prompting you whether to load XP or Linux.

Thanks!

Well, I have to disagree. I tried to do exactly this, and I cannot load XP at all. When I try to load XP from the menu, all it says is non-system disk blah blah blah. It will eventually go back to linux, after you press a key. This is using RedHat 7.2 using grub or lilo. Anyone have any ideas?

ok friend, not bad what happened to you!! what you can do is you start your Linux ( i suppose that it works well). search a file called "lilo.conf". open it with an editor ( or vi if you want) and add the new entry of XP. After that all things will be all right.