ok ive finally deicded to copromise and dual boot windows XP Home and Debian Etch (i need windows for college VPN and MS Access/VB6)

I have a dell with SATA and have added a new HDD and was just planning to install linux to take up all of the second HDD and install GRUB to the MBR - this should allow me to boot both right? If i stick with the defauklt settings should I be ok?

Does the bootloader need to be on the MBR of HDD1 or HDD2?

>this should allow me to boot both right? If i stick with the defauklt settings should I be ok?
Yup.

>Does the bootloader need to be on the MBR of HDD1 or HDD2?
Depends. You need to install GRUB on the MBR of the Primary Master, which can be found in the BIOS (boot screen, or the setup window). Again, the default setting in the Debian install should automatically detect which is the primary master, and it'll be listed as the first hard drive in the list. In any case, make sure that you install Debian after Windows, or else the MBR will be wiped by the Windows installer (and thus no bootloader).

My computer also has two hard drivers. I have XP on the master drive and decided to install Fedora on the slave. I installed the duel boot option in Fedora but was unable to duel boot -- the computer always booted with XP. So I changed the CMOS option to boot on the slave drive instead of master, and that solved the problem. Now I get the grub duel boot menu.

good, by the way anyone who know me will know my thinkpad hates linux. I got it working

Fedpra, gentoo, debian, ubuntu, xandros - they all fail to work properly but aha! SuSE 10.2 runs fine!

just a shame i hate suse .....

Im gonna install debian etch netinstall onto my dells sata drive tonight as a dual boot with win XP - do you think my realtek based (belkin) card will work ok with debs? it runs on pclos and ubuntu after some tweaking?

If it doesnt work then no biggie i have 30m ethernet and a PCI NIC that i know works with linux

In my experience it should be on the primary drive / partition, but I like to use my 400 SATA for storage and my 200GB IDE for data, so I am dual booting LInux and Windows on the same drive (well actually, tri booting, since I wanted to test some things out with Windows Vista).

** Little off topic **

What model is your Thinkpad? I have an older one, a T22 but I have with a touch of work gotten Ubuntu edgy to run just fine. I had issues with Fedora 6 and my video driver, and as stated, no problems with Suse 10.2.

If you really have an issue with Suse you could try installing Ubuntu 5.10 and doing the upgrades. That worked for me. Which desktop on Suse are you running?

i tried gnome as i like debian etch's version but it appears novell heavialy modified it in suse (i hate that new start menu) so i switched to KDE

Its a Thinkpad R30 (whatever the win98/2k era pentium 3M with 128mb ram was)


Back to topic.....

My Dell runs fine with linux dualbooting now. Just needed to do a BIOS flash from XP first in order to get Audio Support for some reason (BIOS A05 also fixes vista audio)

Check out this thread. In particular my post # 13. It will explain how to load as many linux systems as you have room for on one computer.
http://www.daniweb.com/techtalkforums/thread72095.html
I currently can boot 11 systems on my computer. I learned this from a post somewhere ( I forget exactly but I can find the link if anyone wants it)
It was a post where a guy installed 145 operating systems on one computer. Since then he installed over 200 ( I forget the exact number of installs) operating systems on one computer just show he could. He had four hard drives with four types of windows installed too. One windows for each drive. I thought that I was a distro addict. :eek: