new hard drive for dual booting?

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01-14-2005
belliott4488

new hard drive for dual booting?

I run Red Hat Linux 9.0 in stand-alone mode on my home PC, and I'm very happy with it, but I've been thinking of going to dual-boot with Windows (*sigh*), just because of those two or three things I might actually want to use Windows for.

I understand that installing Windows after Linux can be tricky, so I'm considering instead buying another hard drive, setting my current drive to be a slave drive, and then installing Windows and an up-to-date Linux distro on the new drive, which I'd set as the master drive. Not only does this give me my desired dual-boot configuration, but it seems like an easy way to upgrade my distro as well. Of course, I'd still have RH9.0 and my user data on the original drive, right?

Is there anything wrong with this idea? Will I still able to get to the data on my current drive, even if the OS now identifies it as /dev/hdb ? It almost seems like too easy a solution to be true, so I'd like to know if I'm missing something.

thanks,
Bruce
01-14-2005
techieMoe

I've done something similar in the past with no problems. :wink:
01-14-2005
belliott4488

All right - that's what I was hoping to hear.

Am I right, though, that my current drive will become /dev/hdb? If so, will I have to do something special to read the partitions on that drive?

Here's the big question: if I inform GRUB (on the new drive) that RH9.0 is on the second drive, will I still be able to boot up RH9.0 if I want to for some reason? It shouldn't be necessary, if I have a newer distro on the new drive, but it would be cute ...

thnx,
Bruce
01-14-2005
dylunio

Quote:

Originally Posted by belliott4488

Here's the big question: if I inform GRUB (on the new drive) that RH9.0 is on the second drive, will I still be able to boot up RH9.0 if I want to for some reason? It shouldn't be necessary, if I have a newer distro on the new drive, but it would be cute ...

Yes in your new distro youcan edit your grub.conf file and add whatever partition Red hat is on, e.g. hdb1

dylunio
01-14-2005
belliott4488

Quote:

Yes in your new distro youcan edit your grub.conf file and add whatever partition Red hat is on, e.g. hdb1

dylunio

Oh, you guys are just making my day!

I would have thought that anything that currently points to a partition on /dev/hda would break if that partition now exists on /dev/hdb, but maybe this is just some more Linux magic that I need to learn about ...

thanks,
Bruce