Dual booting Win98 & Linux on two physical drives?

[Acidevil]

i've read quite a bit of literature today, and frankly my head is spinning.

i am currently running Win98 which resides on a 40GB HDD with an AMD Athlon 650MHz processor. what i would like to do is keep the 40GB HDD (primary master) exclusive to Win98 and use my old 10GB HDD (primary slave) as a home for Linux. all the literature i have read today talks a lot about defragging my Win98 drive, making a new partition, editing the MBR, etc., however i have yet to run across any documention that details the installation of Linux in a dual boot system with two physical HDDs. does it really matter? am i making a bigger deal out of my situation than necessary?

if anyone could point me to some appropriate documentation, i would be a happy camper. :)

[Plextor]

I Used to have Open Linux and windows me on two seperate drives. Just make sure your slave is formatted and working correctly. Then, during installation, just choose the slave drive for install, and when Linux installs the boot loader, it will just let you choose.

[cuzvinn]

Ive run Win 98 and FreeBSD on two seperate hard drives. Booting to one or the other is as easy as entering the BIOS on bootup and instructing it which IDE to boot from. You can also use LILO for boot up options.

[Acidevil]

thank you both for the clarification.

Just make sure your slave is formatted and working correctlywould you recommend a FORMAT or FDISK command or does the Linux install simply overwrite the data on the drive? my old data (which i no longer need) is still on that drive.

[ 19 October 2001: Message edited by: Acidevil ]

[bdg1983]

You should be able to use fdisk and delete any remaining fat partitions on the 10gb drive. Then start the Linux installation and point it to the correct drive.

[Syngin]

Ugh, this brings back nightmares. Not because its hard or anything but I toasted a Windows install with my first Linux install to a second physical drive because I thought that when it said it was going to modify the MBR, I assumed this was for the second physical drive hehe

Oh well, live and learn. :p

[ 20 October 2001: Message edited by: Syngin ]

[Acidevil]

bleh! i don't fear re-installing Win98, i'd just rather not go there.

thank you all for your input.

:)

[phazeman]

I'm running W2K with MDK 8.1 on 2 different HD's - it works ok - you just have to choose the 'expert' installation, and partitioning the drive (your 10G) with the GUI is peace of cake ! But think about another problem - if you install the LILO on the MBR of your first (Windows) drive, and for some reason (in the future) you'll need to remove the drive temporary, your machine won't boot at all ! This is exactly what i experience now and noone have answer for it ! Off course you can remove the LILO from the mbr (by 'fdisk /mbr' from DOS), but then, if you don't have boot diskete fro the linux, your Linux is 'history'.
Hope i helped. :confused:

[Acidevil]

great point, actually, phazeman. makes perfect sense. i will keep that in mind.