[allyant]

hi im new to linux i have disided to go for Fedora Core but i have 2 drives on my computer one is windows (that i want to keep) my question is can i put linux on the second hard drive??? and on start-up choose between windows or Fedora Core????
allyant

[lotuseclat79]

Originally Posted by allyant

hi im new to linux i have disided to go for Fedora Core but i have 2 drives on my computer one is windows (that i want to keep) my question is can i put linux on the second hard drive??? and on start-up choose between windows or Fedora Core????
allyant

Hi allyant,

You betcha!

I have a 4-disk setup 2-SATA and 2-IDE disks. I use grub as my boot loader - better than lilo.

The first disk is WinXP Pro SP2 with a Win98SE IDE disk slaved to it. The second disk has Fedora Core 3 with a RH7.2 Pro disk slaved to it.

You can opt for Fedora Core 4 at this point for your linux drive.

Initially, my setup was FC3 Linux as the default, but it was easy to change it in the grub boot file to make WinXP the default.

My hardware mapping looks like this (for the SATA drives only):
hd0:
Device Start End Size(MB) Type (Description)
/dev/sda
/dev/sda1 1 9728 76309 NTFS WinXP Pro SP2
/dev/sda2 9729 9729 8 Free Space
hd1:
/dev/sdb
/dev/sdb1 1 13 102 ext3 /boot for FC3
/dev/sdb2 14 9538 94716 ext3 Fedora Core 3
/dev/sdb3 9539 9729 1498 Linux-swap

Where my SATA drives are 80GB each.

My grub boot.conf file looks like this:
# grub.conf generated by anaconda
#
# Note that you do not have to rerun grub after making changes to this file
# NOTICE: You have a boot partition. The means that
# all kernel and initrd paths are relative to /boot/, e.g.
# root (hd1,0)
# kernel /vmlinuz-version ro root=/dev/sdb2
# initrd /initrd-version.img
# boot=/dev/sda
default=1
timeout=10
splashimage=(hd1,0)/grub/splash.xpm.gz
hiddenmenu
title Fedora Core (2.6.10-1.770_FC3smp)
root (hd1,0)
kernel /initrd-2.6.10-1.770_FC3smp.img
title WindowsXP
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
chainloader +1
--------------[end grub.conf: not included in grub.conf]--------------------
Note: change default=0 for Linux FC3 to default load instead of WinXP
change timeout=5 to lower wait time for booting to commence

Obviously, your Fedora Core will have a different name than the one in my grub.conf file, since mine is for a HyperThreaded P4 with 1GB dual-channel memory - thus the smp.

-- Tom

[allyant]

thanks tom installing right now