First step to Dual boot XP and Debian 3.0 r3?

Hello,

I would like to setup a dual boot situation on the following hardware:

Soyo kt600 Dragon V2.0
Athlon XP 3200
(2) Hitachi 80GB SATA hard drives

Currently I have WinXp installed and functioning on "Disk 0". I would like to install Debian 3.0 on the second drive. The second drive "Disk 1" is recognized in the BIOS and in Computer Management as "Unallocated". I have not partitioned or formatted it yet.

I have read numerous How-To's but I have been unable to understand what the first step should be. It sounds like NTLDR is the easiest way to go. I have no problems with tweaking my Boot.ini file, but I am not sure what to do first.

I am somewhat comfortable with the Linux directory structure from playing with my RH9 server. I have never played with Lilo or Grub. I don't have any problems editing .conf files.

If anybody can give me some beginning steps for this I would really appreciate it.

Thanks,
Robert

Simple.

Boot into Debian using the CD. The first thing you do is (if I remember correctly) run cfdisk, which lets you do your partitioning. Simply partition as you wish, and set your /boot to "bootable".

In my experience, I have never had to manually configure my bootloaders. Every distro I have tried as yet (RH, Mandrake, Debian rc4 3.0 Woody, SuSE) has set up the bootloader for me.

Thank you for the reply,

Do you think that my WinXP drive will show up as Hda and my second drive as Hdb? Obviously I don't want to partition the wrong drive. Will cfdisk show me something that will let me know which drive already has data on it, something like "free space".

Robert

Yes, in cfdisk you will see NTFS or fat. and the other drive will be free space.

Ok,

1) I booted from Debian disc one to the installation program.
2) It had me setup the keyboard.
3) It said that "No disk drives were detected"

The next step it wants is to "Preload essential modules from a floppy"

Any ideas where to get SATA drivers for Debian and how to install them?

Thanks,
Robert