xp vs linux on different drives

[akachan]

I'm planning to install linux on one of my two drives in my pc.
in one of them I'm currently running xp. Could anyone with the same setup shed guidance to help reduce any compatability or hardware/software conflicts?

again, thank you all for your continuous support!!!

akachan

[mhacleth]

Does your board have two IDE slots? If yes then you might want to put one as the primary master then the other one as the secondary master. Since you cannot use both XP and Linux at the same time (as far as I know), you can choose which OS to boot by disabling one of them in your CMOS. The active hd will then boot your chosen OS.

However if you have a Master-Slave setup, Linux has Lilo or GRUB to allow you to choose the OS at boot time. You will be given this choice during installation. (Red Hat for example). This will make your HD 'dual-bootable' (forgive my own term).

Right now I have just one 40GB Hard Disk. My other partition is still WinXP (mainly because of Dreamweaver) but coexists happily with Linux.

[mrBen]

You should not have an 'compatibility' or hardware/software conflicts, given that the 2 will never run at the same time. Most distros will happily setup a boot manager (LILO or GRUB) that will allow the 2 to dual boot, without fiddling about with the BIOS.

Bear in mind that while Linux will be able to read data from your NTFS partition (if that's what it is) it won't be able to write yet (IIRC). Windows won't be able to see your Linux partitions at all.

[mhacleth]

Hello mrBen,
I never knew that I can access my NTFS partition in Linux. I tried looking though... but could not find it.

If that's the case, it will save me a lot of time in transferring my files from WinXP. Could you share how it's done? Thanks:p

[akachan]

Thank you...
I'm planning to install Debian.
Last I remember My hardware set up is :

30gb hd on 1ide master plus 2gb slave, 12gb on 2nd ide as master (for linux) plus my cd rom as slave.

Do you think this will work? Do you think I will be okay using Debian as my introductory os to the linux world?

[mhacleth]

I haven't tried Debian. They said it's quite a task installing it but you'll learn a lot along the way.

If you want easy installation, try RedHat (I'm not really quite familiar with the earlier versions). I used RedHat 9 on mine and it took minimal interactions and 20 minutes on my AMD Duron 950MHz machine.

Another is Mandrake.

Anyways mrBen is here to guide you...:p

[mrBen]

I wouldn't recommend Debian for a first try. Go for something more installation friendly, like RedHat, Mandrake or SuSE. This will allow for a more pain-free setup.

NTFS support can be compiled into the kernel like all other FS support. Most distros will do this automatically at install time (although not Debian ;) ), so you should just be able to access your NTFS disk as read-only. There is work being done on write-support for NTFS, but its only in beta, and not really worth the risk at this point.

HTH

[akachan]

thank you ...by the way I took the liberty to add you both to my buddies list. I promise to use your guidance wisely...and limit my request for your help through this site, unless you preffer otherwise...

[mhacleth]

No problem akachan:cool:

Just post any trouble you encounter.

Hey mrBen thanks for being patient with us.
;)

[retsaw]

What I did was to change my second hard to boot ahead of my first hard drive in my BIOS before I installed linux, that way I could put lilo on the MBR of the 2nd hard drive without overwriting the MBR of the first hard drive which would at least leave Windows still working (after changing the BIOS settings back) if lilo didn't install properly. If you do this make sure you change your BIOS before the install and set lilo to install on the MBR of /dev/hdb (if the 2nd hard drive is the primary slave) or /dev/hdc (if the 2nd hard drive is the secondary master). Of course this is by no means essential, I just thought it added a bit of redundancy in case the install didn't go well.

Also I'd like to point out that Red Hat doesn't have NTFS support by default (It can be added after the install), but Mandrake does. I don't know about SuSE.

[mrBen]

Originally posted by mhacleth
No problem akachan:cool:

Just post any trouble you encounter.

Hey mrBen thanks for being patient with us.
;)

np.

What retsaw suggests is a good proposition. I would always recommend that you arm yourselves with a Windows bootdisk and create a Linux bootdisk as part of the install, just in case.

When it comes down to it, it's a matter of what you're comfortable with. If you're reasonably sure that with a boot disk/rescue disk you'll be able to restore WinXP if the MBR gets fried, then you may as well go down the simplest route. If you want to be sure, then do what retsaw suggests.

[mhacleth]

Hey Akachan,

I found this link somewhere in the forum regarding viewing NTFS in RedHat ( if you chose to install RH). You might want to check this out.

http://linux-ntfs.sourceforge.net/info/redhat.html


I also found out that Mandrake will easily recongize and "see" your winXP NTFS partition.

Hope this helps.:p

[akachan]

Help !!!
Ok, I installed debian and everything went ok until i tried booting my pc.
Now, all i get is "01" all accross the screen.....and everything freezes. Could somebody tell me what's going on. Did I screew up my boot file/sector?

My pc:

Pen III 833mhz
256 ram
30gig master with 2gig slave on ide1
cd rom as master with 12gig as slave (where linux is installed) on ide2
I have winxp on my larger drive

please help!!!

[retsaw]

It sounds like a lilo error code.
Did you make a boot floppy?

If not try booting from the Debian install CD and going into rescue mode (There should be one, though I don't have much experiance with Debian so don't know). That should take you to a command prompt, when you are there type:

mkdir /mnt/hdd1
mount /dev/hdd1 /mnt/hdd1
chroot /mnt/hdd1
lilo

That should mount your linux root partition (assuming you only used a single partition), change the root enviroment to your root partition and install lilo again.

That might work, if it gives you any errors, post them back here, also you should post your /etc/lilo.conf file, but not the comments (lines begining with '#') you might even want to delete all the comments from the file. When I tried to install debian recently I had a problem with lilo, so I had a look at /etc/lilo.conf, deleted all the comments and I'm sure I didn't change anything else and it worked after that. I gave up trying to get my network card and cable modem set up though, which is why I'm not using Debian.

Seeing your lilo.conf file will help if what I suggested doesn't do anything. If you need any more help just ask.

[joelc]

When you using two real harddisks instead of just two partitions, you can get a performance gain by setting up a small partition on each drive formatted with the fs for the operating system on the other drive. Use this partition for swap space. IE, if linux is installed on hdb, make a little room on hda for the swap space, and leave a bit on hdb as fat32 and tell windows to use that space for virtual memory. This way you can save seek times on drive you are using when reading from swap.