Dual Boot; worried about overwriting C: Boot Drive with Win2k

From: pkallis (pkallis_at_ameritech.net)
Date: 08/19/03 

Date: Tue, 19 Aug 2003 14:06:08 GMT

Good morning all,

I've purchased a copy of Redhat 6.2 Deluxe version. I have a Maxtor 160
GB drive I just installed, with the IDE 133 card that came with it,
since my BIOS will not support beyond 137 GB. Unfortunately, Maxtor
supplies software which installs EZ-Drive and DDO on the hard drive,
which is not compatible with Partition Magic 8.0.

Since I had a spare IBM 46 GB hard drive around, from a warranty
replacement, I decided to install that as a slave drive, but I have not
FDISK'd it or formatted it. The system BIOS recognizes it as a slave drive.

Here's the issue:

There are really two BIOS's on the machine; one as the IDE 133 card,
with the data cable from it to the 160 GB drive and the other data cable
coming from IDE0 on the motherboard, with the BIOS recognizing it as a
slave.

Since I have Win2000 installed on the 160 GB drive (master), I am a bit
apprehensive to install Linux and have its FDISK (or Disk Druid) make
the partitions and format the drive, for fear it will not recognize the
2nd drive and overwrite all my data and Win2000 on the master drive.

As I'm new to Linux (tired of being corraled by MS), I simply want to
install Linux to play around with it and experiment with applications,
stability and become generally fluent. That seems to point to the
workstation version VS server.

However, the documetation says conflicting things about which version to
install. I also want to dual boot, choosing either win2k or Linux.

Any advice?

Thanks...

Relevant Pages