I need help with setting up a dual boot system using Win XP Pro and Redhat9 or Gentoo Linux. I prefer to use seperate drives for each and still be able to select at boot time. I tried with a new 40gig drive partitioned into 20gig ntfs sections. win xp went fine. then i started the RH9 install and when i got to the partition setup page i choose a manual setup and it came back that it could not read the (i guess ntfs) file type on /dev/hdb. is hdb the second partition? when i chose it, and completed the install of the work station and rebooted nothing happened. i mounted the hard drive into another unit and attempted to view the contents of the drive and all 40 gigs where conceded to RH9 since Windows unit could not read the file system. Please help. This is a project for this coming summer section in which i am taking Linux courses in college and i want a jump start early. Thanks for any help

"...rebooted nothing happened..." What didn't happen? Did the power come on? Did you get any text on the screen? Any errors? Did you make a boot floppy? Can you boot the system with that? /dev/hdb is referring to your primary slave IDE device. /dev/hda = primary master /dev/hdb = primary slave /dev/hdc = secondary master /dev/hdd = secondary slave The partitions a referred to as numbers, so /dev/hdb3 would be the third partition on your primary slave device. FYI If you want to dual boot linux/windoze, it is easier if you install windoze first and then linux.

I was rushed for time on original post and let me explain more. I am using a maxtor 40gig (new) drive located at the time on Primary Slave that was partitioned into 20g parts. Partition 1 = NTFS, Partition 2 = NTFS using the MAXBLAST (maxtor) software that came with the drive. I then installed XP and upon reboot it could not find NTloader. used recovery console to repair (FIXMBR and FIXBOOT) then rebooted and XP ran. I shut down and restarted with RH9 CD1 and selected Workstation and when the Partition setup came up it flashed a dialog box stating that it could not read the file system or that it may be corrupted, but that it could be the drive was setup to fool the bios in case of size of HDD. I selected ignore. so far so good. when the partition info came up it didn't show 2 partitions but only one of 32gig. Couldn't figure out why. so i figured that RH9 would auto detect XP and maybe it just wasn't showing up. I finished the install and rebooted. it powered down and powered up, ran through POST. ok so far. upon bootup when it looked for the boot loader i am assuming it could not find it. Stated could not find bootloader. more than likely i did something wrong. so i just reformatted the drive with same software into 2-20gig parts. and have done nothing since. is this the procedure i follow: 1: partition and format HDD 2 partitions of 20gig ea. NTFS for Partition 1 FAT32 for #2 2: install XP 3: install RH9 4: edit bootloader confg file to read XP and not DOS is this correct for a single dual boot drive? Can i use 2 seperate HDD? By the way... Thanks for the speedy reply. ghostrider

I would always suggest two separate hard drives for dual boot as it makes things a lot simpler and safer. Just out of interest, what is on your primary master? If you still want to keep them both on the same drive, I would follow these steps: 1) Completely delete all partitions. 2) Boot off the XP CD and create a 20Gb partition from within its setup. Format this to FAT32 if you can as it is more compatible with linux than NTFS. LEAVE THE REST OF THE DRIVE AS UNPARTITIONED AND UNFORMATTED. 3) Once XP is installed and working, boot off the redhat disk and complete the rest of the partitioning from within that. To keep things simple I would just create two partitions, one for swap (~640Mb) and the rest for your root file system (~9Gb)