I have winxp pro 2600 build set up on 2 drives I can boot to either drive. I want to install linux on a third drive that I can also boot to. Can this be done? Right now I have my dirves set as follows. 20g drive master 80g drive slave, both on the same cable to the first slot on my IDE card. (133 promise card) My system is gateway with 700mhz 2 years old. Help I want to try this. Should I hook up my 3rd drive to the second slot with a seperate cable. Should the third drive be set as slave or master. Are there cables where 3 drives hook to one cable ??

yes it can be done . hook up the thirt disk on your secund ide port and install linux there.. it's a shure thing. i have two disk on a pentium 4 1.5ghz. om the firs disk i have windows me. 2000 and xp onde the secund i have linux . important is that you boot linux froma a floppy disk .just in case. have fun

It can be done in many ways and it depends how you choose to.. 1) simple is that you make the hard disk bootable using win98 CDROM and then leaving the file system to FAT32 install Windows XP. It will automatically select the dual boot option.Now you simply have to put an autoexec.bat file with loadlin and boot image copied in to yours windows partition (considering you have linux installed in your system). 2) if u want to have the NTFS file system then you will have to compile the thing in the kernel (which i have been unable to do since today :) ) and use lilo as boot loader.

You can leave your entire windows partitions as NTFS. Install Linux and during the installation have it write Grub or Lilo boot loader onto the root partitons. i.e. /hdb1 if it is the first partition of your second hard drive. ALso have it make a boot floppy. After installation boot from the floppy and as root put a blank floppy in the drive to create a dummy boot sector on it using the following command: # dd if=/dev/hdb1 bs=512 count=1 of=/mnt/floppy/bootsect.lin (/dev/hdb1 is your boot partiton) Now boot into XP and right click on properties of My Computer and go to Advanced > Startup Recovery Settings to EDIT the boot ini manually. Add to the boot.ini: c:\bootsect.lin="Linux RedHat 7.2" This is what mine looks like: [boot loader] timeout=30 default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS [operating systems] multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect c:\bootsect.lin="Linux RedHat 7.2" Now copy the bootsect.lin to c:\ and you are done .. you can now use the NT boot loader to start.

but friends i use loadlin and i want to dual boot linux using a simple batch file with NT boot loader the batch file will be c:\loadlin\loadlin c:\vmlinuz root=/dev/hda6 .........

I'm going to jump in and ask a follow up. I have two disks, one with debian and the other with Windows XP Presently I load debian with a floppy, but I am trying to set up the XP bootloader. My boot loader looks about right (according to the above post), and on startup I get debian as a choice, but when I try to execute it, I get a full screen of scrolling hex sevens 07 07 07 07 07 (etc ...) I tried the dd command again # dd if=/dev/hdb1 bs=512 count=1 of=/mnt/floppy/bootsect.lin -which should correspond to my linux boot partition-and recopied bootsect.lin to c:\, directed bootloader correctly, but get the same results. Any thoughts on what is going wrong? Thanks, Kevin

i have a laptop presario 700 with XO home Edition preinstaled and i mount SuSE 7.3 and make a diskette to boot but a want boot my computer directly no for diskette, i configure my other computer with Win 98 and Suse i put the lilo to MBR, but in XP donīt work. Thanks