Installing to a second hard drive.

Alright, before you guys jump down my back, I did search but I think my set up, or problem is a little different. I've also never used Linux before.

The reason I am installing it to a second hard drive and not to another partition on my main hard drive is because the hard drives are simply too small to share. Sorry, now.. to the point

I have two hard drives, both are set as masters because that was the only way I could get them to work. My windows XP hard drive is secondary master and my potential Linux hard drive is primary master.

Anyway, when I go to install mandrake, by simply putting in the CD and rebooting my computer, and it comes down to choosing a partition.. I get lost.

I choose to do use a custom partition, since I don't want to erase my windows XP and I don't want to use the free space on my windows XP hard drive. Then I see two tabs, hda and hdc. I figured one of them was my windows XP hard drive and one of them was my second hard drive, however, it says that one of them has 9.5gb and one has 7mb.. both of my hard drives are 10 gig hard drives. This is where I get confused. I don't know what to do.

Sorry if there is not enough info, if someone could tell me what else they needed to know to help me that would be fine.

Drives/partitions in Linux are set up this way:
IDE0:0 = hda (first hard drive)
IDE0:1 = hdb
IDE1:0 = hdc (your windows hard drive)
IDE1:1 = hdd

Partitions as follows: hda1, hda2, ... (only 4 primary partitions possible). From hda5 on, partitions are logical..

Hope this helps you... Probably the 7 Mb is free space on your Windows disk, don't ask me, but it's always something like that when you partition it (alwasy leave 8 MB free).

Actually that makes sense. I remember now when I was installing windows it seperated like 7 or 8 mb into a seperate partition. And the one that showed the full amount of hard drive space was hda. Going to try again now, thanks.

If I choose erase entire disk

Quote:

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Erase entire disk. If you want to delete all data and all partitions present on your hard drive and replace them with Mandrakelinux, choose this option. Be careful because you won't be able to undo this operation after you confirm.

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will I be able to choose which hard drive to use? or will it erase my windows hard drive.

If your hda contains windows partitions (you wanted to use hda for Linux right?) then you have to choose 'yes'. Just make sure it only applies to hda, your first hard drive!

Thanks guys I got it installed to my second hard drive. Quick question, how do I choose which one I want it to boot to without going into my BIOs to set hard drive priority? Or is that the only way?

If you're still in the install, create a boot floppy. Set your bios to boot first from floppy and then from HD. When you want to boot Linux, you just put in the floppy.

Or you can install Grub on your hard drive too, normally it should also have an entry for your Windows install.

Thanks. Everything seems to be working correctly but could you explain this to me? I went onto windows and here is what my disk management shows.. the top one is my linux hard drive.

http://img119.echo.cx/img119/1909/diskmgmnt13bu.jpg

what I want to know is what the 5.23 gigabyte and 1.05 gigabyte partitions are for? because I think only the 3.26 is what is available to me on Linux. I used the erase entire disk option, so it automatically set the partitions and installed.

Linux uses multiple partitions by default. I suppose Mandrake also made you a /home partition. The 1 Gb partition is a swap partition I suppose (in Windows, it is also a splendid idea to have one, I do, so do many others, it increases performance - less fragmentation of the page file). The first one, at the left, is a primary partition, your root (/). That's where Linux is installed. Your /home partition is your 'own' drive (your documents and settings and stuff will be stored automatically there). Don't worry, you won't notice anything within Mandrake about the partitions. Linux is far more flexible than Windows when it comes to this :).