Help with second Hard Drive installation

[P5Playa]

If I put a second hard drive in my PC can I install Linux on this new drive without formatting my first Hard Drive

 

[psivius]

Absolutley!
Which flavour of Linux are you installing...?

 

[Lino]

Modes please move this to the right section

 

[cavedog]

Yes but I think linux installs the Grub app. So when you deside to remove linux your normal windows wont boot. This happend to me. But i stand to be corrected

 

[BTTB]

Modes please move this to the right section

Done.

 

[kevinswan007]

Modes please move this to the right section

isnt the correct abbreviation 'mods'?

 

[PostmanPot]

isnt the correct abbreviation 'mods'?

Typo methinks.

 

[flarkit]

Yes but I think linux installs the Grub app. So when you deside to remove linux your normal windows wont boot. This happend to me. But i stand to be corrected

It is relatively easy to remove Grub or Lilo from the boot sector. You need to boot from the Windows CD, and use the repair tool calld "fixmbr" to remove the Linux boot-loader.

To install Linux on the second HDD, I recommend doing this:

1) Physically unplug the original, Windows HDD
2) Install the new HDD
3) Install Linux
4) It will install the boot-loader (either Grub or Lilo) on the new HDD and provide the boot-menu, with a few entries for Linux
5) Reconnect the Windows HDD, as a secondary device.
6) Now boot into Linux and add an entry in the boot-loader's menu. You'll need to do a little research about how to do this, but it's not complicated and will not do anything to your Windows drive. Depending on how many partitions you have, it may take a few attempts to figure out which partition to specify in the boot-loader, but then you're sorted.

If you should need to remove Linux from your PC, you simply reconnect your Windows disk and set it as the bootup disk.

 

[P5Playa]

Thank you all for the replies

 

[rward]

in your /etc/grub.conf you usually need somethnig like:

map (hd0) (hd1)
rootnoverify (hd1)

I think that could be correct - but be extremly careful with the spacing,
map(hd0)(hd1) did not work for me and neither did
map (hd0)(hd1)
I needed (and this drove me nuts for a couple of hours)
map (xxx) (xxx)

you can find the hd names by being logged in as root and typing dmesg then scrolling through the output till where in detects your harddrives.

but google for 'grub dual boot' and you'll find plenty of info..