What Would My Drive Be For Hd_grub (mandrake 10)

[GrdLock]

I downloaded Mandrake 10.0 Official, currently I'm using Windows XP. I'm not too familiar with the whole hda, hdb1, etc etc stuff... I'm simply used to C:, D:, E:, F:, etc, and previously I've always installed Mandrake from a CD.

I'm installing Mandrake from my hard drive though. Currently it's located in E:\i586\. I visited qa.mandrakesoft.com/hd_grub.cgi to setup the menu.1st file to go along with the hd_grub.img on the floppy.

Now, I look on that webpage and see: xxx BIOS hard drive, xxx IDE hard drive, xxx partition.

I know it's on the primary partition on that drive, but the BIOS and IDE blanks throw me into a world of confusion. In the Computer Management part of XP, it lists the drive as disk 1. I've got three hard drives, and I'm pretty sure all three are plugged into a PCI ATA100 controller. It's been so long since I've upgraded my computer that I can't even remember which hard drive is which and all physically, and don't care to dig around in the clutter I call a computer and find out.

Someone help me out. Is there just some utility I can download that can make the menu.1st file automatically by me just clicking on the folder where it's located in Windows, or at least a program to identify to me what my hard drive is called in linux terms? (the hda1 etc stuff)

Please help, I'm ready to reboot and install right now I just need to get this right, I'd hate to erase my Windows partition and have the file messed and not be able to install.

[ooop]

I'm not sure if I can solve your problem completely, but here is a little help on the way :

While windows just lists the partitions on all the hard disks like c: d: e: and so on, linux takes a slightly different approach. It's basically like this :

In a standard PC, you have 4 ide-busses :
Primary Master, Primary Slave, Secondary Master and Secondary Slave.

If you were to plug harddrives into all of these, your harddrives would then be:

hda, hdb, hdc, hdd.
see the pattern? =)

now usually, you will have a cd/dvd player/recorder somewhere around there, which will be one of those, depending on where you put it.

Assume that you have a harddrive as primary master.
That would make it hda
Assume secondly that you have a few partitions on it.
The first partition will then be hda1, the second hda2, and so on.

To complicate things a little more, there is a difference between primary partitions and logical partitions. An IDE-drive can have no more than 4 primary partitions. These will be hda1, hda2, hda3 and hda4. But, to allow for even further partitioning of drives, the concept of "logical partitions" was introduced, which means you can split up each primary partition into 4 logical partitions.

say you have two primary partitions and two logical on hda
The primary partitions will then be hda1, and hda2.
The logical partitions will be hda5, and hda6 (since hda3 and hda4 are reserved names for primary partitions).

I don't know if any of this helped, but at least now you know what all this
hda1 crap is about =)

good luck

/ooop

[Nerderello]

here's an idea for you. Get yourself a standalone Linux distro (like Knopix or Suse). These will boot from the CD and then run from the CD, so no need to instal.

Then, when you have Gnome or KDE GUI up, go into the System toold menu option and pick up the Hardware browser. Start this and then select the hard drives option and it will show you, in a pretty graphical way, all of the hard disks that you have. The partitions on thos disks and what each partition is called.

have fun

Nerderello