Two Hard drives

[chrytech2z]

I have a second hard drive i'm putting in my pc and was wondering how to install mandrake 10.1 on it, my other disk is win XP, can i just install it from the cd-rom or do i have to do it separately from XP?

[dylunio]

To install just boot fom the cd, with the BIOS set so that cd drive is the first bootable device,

dylunio

[chrytech2z]

From there i can format the other drive and install linux?

[dylunio]

When you insatall it you get to choose were you want to put linux, and when you choose your second hard drive, it will format it fo ext2 o'r whaterver format you want, and install linux on it;

dylunio

[chrytech2z]

Thankyou very much for your help

[Dr. Who]

I read all that would be needed for my question at hand. This was the closest thread to my question besides dual booting which persist to using one drive. I want to install mandrake more less may change the linux OS not to sure yet. I have 2 HDD's and one is a 200 gig which is for my windows only and I have a 80 gig that I want to use just for linux. I saw the config on this as :

Primary master...Windows hard drive
Primary slave...CDrom
Secondary master...Linux hard drive (BIOS set to boot this one)
Secondary slave...not used

I was wondering is this the way you are supposed to do it or can I leave it as :

Primary master...Windows hard drive
Primary slave...Linux hard drive
Secondary master.... DVDRW
Secondary slave...not used

I was wondering if I could do it this way and still use grube to tell which OS I want to boot into? I am new at this tried it before on just one drive ended up stuck and lost windows and everything don't want to do this again. If you need more info I'll be glad to share as of right now I am going to do this using Mandrake 2006. My main concern is being able to boot into windows when I restart or Linux. I think if this hill is climbed the rest will be easy to learn. I am new at this so simple english would be best so I can fully understand. Thanks in advance for the help.

[Zelmo]

Either of those configurations will work. It used to be that optical drives shouldn't be on the same channel as hard drives, because they used different DMA modes. I don't know if that's still the case, but I'd go with configuration #2 just to be safe.

You can leave the primary master as the boot drive (after you install Linux from the CD) and install GRUB to the MBR. That will give you the choice of which OS to run each time you boot.