Dual Hard Drive question

[wannabegeek]

I recently loaded Mandrake 6.5 (i think, it's a burn) on an old 2 gig HD I had for the heck of it. What I wanna know is, how can I dual boot these two drives i have (win98SE and Mandrake) I had no intention of dual booting these at first, so i didn't set anything up for that, so I wanna know what is the easiest way to go about this when I already have both operating systems loaded? I'm very new to Linux, and I appreciate and patience and/or help i recieve. thanks

[toolshed]

ve athat same question. But i was going to use Mandrake 7.2. How do you put Linux on a seperate drive?

[Ripley]

Originally posted by wannabegeek:
What I wanna know is, how can I dual boot these two drives i have (win98SE and Mandrake).

The simplest way, without overwriting your masterboot record with grub or lilo, is to either use Loadlin, or to use a boot floppy for the Linux install.

Boot floppy = slow boot.
Loadlin = fast boot.

There's a newbie help file on using loadlin to be found here (http://www.linuxnewbie.org/nhf/intel/osbooting/index.html).

[slowlearner]

When you are in Mandrake, you should be able to edit /etc/lilo.conf from the command line (I use vi) and add both OSes and their respective hard drives (probably hda and hdb). Something like this, I think:

boot=/dev/hda (this would be where mbr is)
timeout=50
compact
prompt
message =/boot/message
default =linux
vga =normal
read-only
map=/boot/map
install=/boot/boot.b
image=/boot/vmlinuz
label=linux
root=/dev/hdb1

other=/dev/hda1
label=windows
table=/dev/hda

Just substitute the partitions where your OSes are. Then issue /sbin/lilo

[ 07 February 2001: Message edited by: slowlearner ]

[f'lar]

If you have two drives, and spare space on the windows drive, it is faster if you can put your linux swap on the windows drive, and leave some space on the linux drive for the windows swap file. It means that there is a completely different set of right heads being used for virtual memory, and it won't slow down other disk accesses any.