installing linux on a second hard drive

[schunn99]

good day all,

I have a copy of red hat 8. I have windows xp pro on a 40 gb hard drive. I have another 20gb hard drive in a old computer that has windows 98 on it. I want to put red hat 8 on the 20gb. How do I wipe windows off the 20 gb and install linux on the 20 gb hard drive and not have linux on my 40gb/windows hard drive?

all for your help in advance,
sincerely,
schunn99

[mmills]

well, if your plan is to wipe clean a drive, put the linux cd in and it will format over the top, I would unplug the hd you already have formatted in your prefered os, then plug it back up and pop in the cd, and choose hda or hdb and if you want the slave to carry the second os then choose partiton to hdb.

[mmills]

if you want to keep xp and have linux on your 20 gig drive then, if you are using redhat, install your 20 as the slave and choose linux to install on hdb it will put a grub or lilo boot loader on your windows partition, in bios you will need set up your system to boot to your primary hard drive, after the installation, re-boot when you have all your setting to your satisfaction, when you re boot it will either be a graphical or text boot option, I would suggest lilo, be sure that your bios is set to your 40 gig to boot, and disable all other hard drives on the boot option, this will make the boot loader load and it will ask you if you prefer linux, or windows to boot, there will be a timer for like 10 seconds, linux will be the primary os to boot, you will have to choose windows if you want to use it.

hope it helps

[hammer123]

I would use Redhat 9 myself. You will want to use the installation program to remove all partitions from hdb automatically. If this is not an option then use disk druid to set up the correct partition style. The boot loader should be something you should not have to think about during the install but it can help in case your file system's order changes.