woes of installing 2nd O/S

[Nooyawkah]

Stop me before I kill again!

I'm so glad I didn't have much on my windows harddrive, 'cause it's gone now. I bought a 2nd hdd and installed it as slave. Then I installed mandrake 8.2 (from a commercial disk) and, you guessed it, it wiped out windowsXP.

XP is now back in. How can I make mandrake install on the OTHER hdd?

And secondly, how can I control which hdd boots each time. Do I have to go into the bios every time?

Help greatly appreciated.

[Jiggy]

im on the right track with this, but i mite not be looking in the right direction.
i only did this 2 weeks back and im not that sure, other will come.

put your second hard drive at the end of your second IDE cable and set it to master, if anything at the end of that IDE cable now move it to the middle and set it to slave.
i think if you startup with your Linux disk in the drive it should give you the option to choose the second hard drive.

while installing it will deal with the daul boot for you, so when you start your puter it will give you 2 to choose from.

[mjc]

Ok, first make sure that the drives are detected by BIOS, both of them should be set to autodetect. Windows needs to be on the Master (at least in this setup..usually just the primary partition).

What file system is XP using, FAT32 or NTFS?

You probably are running NTFS and let Mandrake install the bootloader to the MBR right? (default for LILO).

Linux cannot, in its default config recognise a NTFS partition. So if you had XP as NTFS then Mandrake would not "see" it after the install, but it wasn't gone, just not accessible without repairing the bootsector. Since you were trying to put it on a second drive, most likely since Mandrake could only "see" the non-NTFS it thought there was only one drive/partition.

If you install XP to a FAT32 partition and don't install LILO to the MBR you should be ok, or if you want to use NTFS, then try this (http://www.poopoccurs.com/linux/Dualboot.html) method.

[Nooyawkah]

thanks for the help and wish me luck