installing on a second hard disk

[n313t3]

I am going to make a dual boot sys with windows 98SE and linux. I have 2 HDD. can anyone give explicit instructions how to install linux on the second one. I tried looking at guides but no one tells about this subject. Also which is the best linux for a relative newbie who wants a desktop and shell. :confused:

[DimGR]

Originally posted by n313t3
I am going to make a dual boot sys with windows 98SE and linux. I have 2 HDD. can anyone give explicit instructions how to install linux on the second one. I tried looking at guides but no one tells about this subject. Also which is the best linux for a relative newbie who wants a desktop and shell. :confused:

JUst choose the " install to hdb " option.

[n313t3]

but my HDD is already partitioned into 4. should i delete them. also is mandrake good? for a new user

[Jata]

To start with you're probably better off with the more 'user friendly' distributions like Red Hat (Fedora) or Mandrake as they tend to make the installation process a lot easier. Also make sure you install Windows first otherwise it will bugger up the boot loader you set up with Linux and render it unusable.
To begin with you're probably better off keeping things simple in terms of partitions. Assuming you're installing the operating systems on different disks I'd go with something like the following:

Windows on first disk
Linux on second with partitions something like this:
/boot/ Around 20MB
/swap/ About double your RAM
/ Root filesystem with whatever is left.

To be honest the installer with whatever you choose will probably be able to explain this better than me. I started out with Red Hat and I found the install quite painless. You can always progress to something else once you have more of an idea as to what you want.

With regard to graphical environments go for either KDE or Gnome. These could be a bit slow depending on your machine though.

Good luck.;)

[n313t3]

thanks i'm going for Mandrake. i looked around their site and it looks really good. I think it will work cos I have a P3 552MHz, 190Mb RAM.

[hard candy]

Linux Newbie Administrator Guide (http://linux-newbie.sunsite.dk/) Bookmark this guide, it will come in handy, especially with a rpm-based distro like Mandrake. Also, Mandrake itself has very good documentation.

[n313t3]

i checked the hardware configuration and most of the common hardware is not supported on Mandrake. Does this really pose any problem

[blackbelt_jones]

When I had WIndows and Linux on two hard drives, I never figured out how to configure GRUB. I'm sure that it's easy, I just haven't learned it yet...

so what I did was use the boot sequencer in the BIOS setup to select which Hard drive to boot from. The Linux harddrive was the master; if I wanted to run Windows, I just disabled the linux hd in the bios; easy as pi!

Of the three distros you menton, I think I would probably choose Mandrake, but how about Fedora?