installing linux on second hard disk

[donoho]

Hello,

a friend of mine bought a second hard disk and he wanted to install linux on it.
I wanted to help him but installation software of the mandrake distribution didn't succeed in reading the partition table.

In fact, the second hard disk is well connected (he is referenced in BIOS as primary slave) but is not visible from windows.

In order to install linux on this second hard disk, can you give me some pieces of advice.
Did the fact that the new hard disk may not be formatted plays a rule ?(It is possible to get a shell by changing of console with Alt-F4 during the installation procedure and a minimum number of instructions as fdisk can be used)

Thank you very much for you future help,

Donoho

[mdwatts]

Being that the drive is detected in the bios, but not in Windows, I would think the drive does not have any partitions on it (unallocated space).

The Mandrake installer (in Expert Mode) should give you the ability to partition the drive.

Once you get to a certain point in the install, you should be able to switch to a VC using alt-f# as you suggested.