Installing on separate drive from

[uubeerdude]

I am working with Suse 10.0. My son bought it for me as a gift along with the Suse Bible manual a while back when I made mention that I would like to learn to use Open Source options. Subsequently I want to run that distro because I have the documentation. I also have Redhat 7.3 that came with a college text in a class I could not finish due to medical issues. Perhaps it would make no difference using the manual with Suse 10.2 or 10.3. Please do tell.

I want to install the Suse os onto a second drive, and possibly the Redhat distro too. I have been doing some homework and find that there are issues with booting vista and linux on the same drive. The manufacturer tells me that to install another os, even a windows version, on the oem drive will void the vista warranty. I really don't know that I would miss it because the Bozos in HP support make a simple fix an all day affair, and have given instructions that went nowhere. Subsequently I have worked through some of the problems myself, for instance when vista magically came up missing and the installation dvd's would not run the install and they were just as stumped as I was. That was a few days after their own onboard hardware and software failed to burn the restore discs as advised by them. After an entire day on the phone wasting half a dozen discs they agreed to send me some. Then there are the issues with vista's lack of backward compatibility with programs I have used for years.

The onboard drive is an SATA 160gb drive that came with Vista home basic installed on a Compaq Presario (yes, I know) SR5113WM. I have a spare Seagate Barracuda 60gb ATA hdd. While the Seagate drive is recognized in the vista boot options, in the bios and tests fine, and in vista windows management where it is listed as a healthy drive and where I erased and formatted it, although the only option is to format using NTFS. It is not recognized when I run the Suse installation, which tries to partition and install it on the unallocated space on C with the seagate drive connected. The Seagate drive is listed as the first drive in the bios and vista boot, the onboard as the third drive. I have begun the installation both with and without the onboard drive connected. When I begin the installation without it connected the Suse installation progam indicates that there is no disc and to check my hardware.

There is one serial port on the motherboard for connection with the Seagate drive. I need to know if I need to set it as slave, which it is now with no jumpers, or if there is something I am missing. Is an ATA drive compatible in tandem with an SATA drive?

So I would like to know if there is an advantage in using a second drive, whether it makes little or no difference when using the OEM drive, will it work at all, or if there are other options.

I also switched from a Lexmark to an HP all in one because the Lexmark machine does not support Linux. If I never do business with HP again it will be too soon. HP no longer ships OCR software with its products, and Vista does not support the Caere program that has worked fine for me or Roxio Easy CD Creator 5, even though Creator Basic comes bundled. I seem to remember reading something about a work around for installing those programs, but cannot find it now.

Please advise. Thanks.

[yancek]

Your manual for opensuse 10.0 should be useful for a later version (10.2/10.3) and it's a simple matter to go to their website and find out what changes there are between versions.

Booting windows/linux on the same drive, major problem people have is installing windows AFTER Linux as windows always overwrites the MBR. Most of the problems people have are related to not doing much research so that they don't understand the process for beginning. Having the opensuse documentation is a good way to begin.

If you formatted a partition as ntfs you won't be able to load linux and if you do your formatting with a windows program you won't get other options. There also is no problem installing multiple OS's on the same hardrive. If you read these forums even for a short time you will find any number of people who have 3-10 and more on one computer/one hardrive. It's your choice, obviously, to decide what the warranty is worth.

You might try downloading a live-cd of GParted which is a disk partition that works particularly well that may work better to create and format partitons. Another thing you might try is downloading a live-cd with Linux such as Knoppix, ubuntu (many others) so you can obtain information specific to your computer to post if you have problems with an install.

Good Luck

[uubeerdude]

Thank you for your advice. I did install SUSE 10 on the SATA oem hdd with Vista. Even thouh it was formatted with NTFS the recommended installation partitioning reformatted the linux partition with a reiferfs. Glad of that. Imperative was to configure windows as the top choice and as the default in grub. Booting is going nicely and most of the SUSE programs are working flawlessly, without causing any conflicts with Vista.

There is a very good partitioning tool within YAST, although it was not necessary to use it. It appears capable of performing any partitioning my little old heart desires and could come in usefully down the road.

I am having some trouble configuring some hardware, but that is another thread.

Thanks again.