Hello, I just ordered a 120gb hd, and downloading redhat 9 right now. I currently have XP on my 20gb master hd, and a 2nd 40gb hd for storage. What I plan on doing is dropping the data from that 40gb hd onto the 120gb, and using the 120gb as my secondary/storage drive. Then I want to wipe the 40gb drive and install it as my 3rd hd and put redhat onto it. My question is should that 40gb drive be my secondary master or slave to my dvd/cd-rom? Also, when redhat is put on that 3rd, 40gb drive, how will it handle the boot loader? Will it automatically put Grub or Lilo into the MBR on my primary XP drive? The redhat site seemed to say that installing redhat on a 2nd drive would be the easiest install, but didn't mention the boot loader placement. Can anyone advise me on how I should go about this?

Also, when I do the data transfer to the 120gb drive I plan on physically removing it from my box so I don't accidentally install redhat onto it. I did that a year ago when I last attempted installing linux. I wiped the 40gb drive on accident. I don't want a repeat of that on the 120gb drive with the only back up of my data. Will physically removing it from the box, then installing Redhat onto the 40gb drive, then putting the 120gb drive back in cause any problems? Sounds silly I know. But I don't want to take any chances :)

Brian: During the install of the latest versions of RedHat (9.0, Fedora or Enterprise) It gives you the option of installing Grub (default is install) I do not remember wether there is a Lilo option.) If you select to install Grub, it will install what it needs of Grub, to the MBR on the first drive, and then the configuration file is grub.conf on the RedHat partition. After RedHat is installed you can manually edit the grub.conf file to change the time allowed before the default OS automatically loads, change the default OS, and or change the labels describing the OS in the Grub menu. Grub will detect the XP install and create an entry for it, although it just calls it DOS, or maybe Windows (I do not remember which.) I'm not sure which drive configuration is best.

Thanks for the info. Seems like the install should be prett painless. Can anyone recommend a drive configuration?

My recommendation for your drive configuration would be: Primary Master = 20GB XP Primary Slave = 40GB Red Hat Secondary Master = CD/CD-RW/DVD Secondary Slave = 120GB Data (shared btwn XP and Red Hat) This way you will have a separate IDE channel for HDDs whenever you are either in XP or Red Hat, thus better data transfer. If you're going to use the 120GB to share btwn XP and RH, make sure you format it as vfat.

This is the first I've ever heard of VFAT :) I searched google and found a few articles that recommend using vfat as well. A couple other walk you through mounting a FAT32 drive in Linux. If it's formatted as VFAT, it would be instantly recognizable by Windows and Linux? Are there any performance issues with VFAT when compared to FAT32?