I have been searching around but not to sure how to do this as most of the how to's are assuming that I am installing linux after windows. I have one harddrive with windows xp media center, and the other is Knoppmyth. I just want to add them both to the ribbon and select the one I want at boot up. I don't see why I have to partition or resize anything. If you know what I should type in google to get the answer I am looking for please help, if not then have a good day and thank you for reading this anyway.

You're not providing a lot of details or sounding like someone who is going to be able to fill in the blanks resulting from that lack of information.

"Add them both to the ribbon" - Make sure you know which position on the IDE drive cable is the CS master and which is the slave. This matters. You're going to want the Linux drive on the master and the MS-Windows drive on the slave. You may also need to make sure that the drives are jumpered appropriately. (Usually both CS, but possibly MA/SL if that doesn't work with your BIOS/drives/cable.)

Presumbably both drives already have a bootable image installed? If not get there with the drives connected one at a time.

Then with both drives installed and the linux drive as the IDE primary master boot the system into Linux.

As root edit /etc/lilo.conf and add an appropriate windows boot section. It will look something like this:



Finally run lilo -v to write this setup to you boot record.

Thanks for replying and both hard drives do boot I have been just unplugging them so I only use the one at a time. I have found the section in lilo.conf. I have changed it as per instructions. just another question if you don't mind

I now have



is this correct?

Okaky problem is solved. Thanks alot. What I had to do is I followed your directions and then during post I hit tabl to switch to post and then F11 brings up the the boot menu then I can select the appropriate Hard Drive. Just a shot in the dark here but, is there some way that I can use like fast switching between them. Or just have to boot up and shut down one at a time. And can I use any space off the windows drive as it is a 250 and the linux drive is 30.

No and yes respectively. You can set up a VM and have it boot the other disk but that's a fairly advance bit of setup.


You should be able to add an entry to your /etc/fstab to mount the ms-windows disk, but I don't remember the fine details off the top of my head. Read the man pages (e.g. "man mount") or search for "mounting windows partitions under linux".