How to install Linux (Suse 10.1) on a second drive ?

[cgkeller]

I have a PC Desktop with Windows YP installed. It works fine, but I would like to install Sose 10.1 on a second hard drive, so it would not disturb my Windows XP OS, BUT I'M SCARED LIKE A RABBIT!
I read that someone tried to install MEPIS on his computer with Win98, and he lost all his data on the Windows drive and he had to pay ONTRACK $720. to retrieve his valuable data.
He suggested that before attempting to install SUDE on my second hard drive, I should take out provisorily the hard drive with WIN98 on it, so that SUSE would not be able to touch it.
Is this a good safety precaution?

Some additional guidance how to solve my problem would be very much appreciated.

Charles Keller.

 

[pansophic]

Installing on a second hard drive is not difficult and should not affect the data on your primary drive providing that you have a decent understanding of the hard disks on your machine and don't install onto the Windows disk.

Dual booting a machine is well documented, but not idiot proof. Like all major system upgrades it pays to back up your data BEFORE you attempt the upgrade.

Taking out the Windows hard disk will ensure that you do not accidentally overwrite the Windows partition, but it will not automatically configure GRUB or LILO to dual boot, so that will be a separate manual process that you will be forced to endure.

If you install the second disk, you need to know how it was installed, like was it the primary slave drive or the secondary master or the secondary slave if it is an IDE disk? Those disks would be named /dev/hdb, /dev/hdc and /dev/hdd respectively. If the disks are SATA the second disk should be /dev/sdb.

You can start to get a feel for the hardware under Linux by booting with the SuSE liveCD, clicking on the hard disk icon so that it mounts, opening a terminal window and typing "mount" to display the mounted file systems. This will tell you what the liveCD believes is your Windows disk (as well as some other file sytem information that will probably be useless to you at this point). Then install your second disk and boot with the liveCD again. This time you will probably see two hard disk icons on the desktop. Open one of them and confirm whether it is your Windows disk or not. Again open a terminal window and use the mount command to determine the device name of that disk. Click on the other hard disk icon and repeat the process. Now you should know which of the disks is your Windows disk and the other can be used for your installation.

The installation is graphical and should be pretty straight forward from that point. But again, I wouldn't do any of this until you have a viable backup of the critical data on your Windows partition.


pansophic

 

[cgkeller]

Hi Pansophic (MIS),
Thank you very much for your very good explanation. It certainly sheds more light onto my problem and I'm looking forward to the solution.

This is what I have so far:

C:\ hda1 - Seagate 160 GB with Windows XP
Primary IDE Master

D:\ hdb1 - Samsung 40 GB
(completely empty but reserved for Linux Suse
(Primary IDE slave)

Do you think I could go ahead now with what you have suggested?

Thank you very much for your guidance.

Charles Keller.

 

[pansophic]

Sure. Now that you know where your drives will be in Linux parlance, you should feel safe enough installing SuSE. Just make sure that there is no formatting being proposed for hda1.

I generally install the bootloader on the Master Boot Record, in your case it will want to install either GRUB or LILO (I forget which SuSE uses) on the MBR of hda. That part is OK. If you decide to stop using Linux later, you can boot your Windows OS, open a command prompt and run "fixboot" to rewrite your MBR (overwrites GRUB or LILO with the Windows boot manager).

Good luck! Ask more questions if you run into problems. People here are very helpful.


pansophic