Santa's Bringing a second hard drive, now what?

[neodave]

Well I know I'd like to have two HDD, but I'm not sure how two drives work. It would seem a switch would be necessary to choose the one you'd like to boot from. Is that a fair assessment? Are there any good info sites out there regarding this? This newbie could certainly use some help. Put simply I'd like to have one HDD for Windows and dedicate the other to Linux Mandrake.
Thanks
Neodave

[KenKun]

Hi ..
I will assume you you already have Windows on the old drive and you want to install Mandrake on the new one .. so during the installation process of Mandrake, you will setup a "boot manager", so each time you start your PC you will have the choice to choose one OS to load ...

Any other info.. don`t hesitate to ask dude
Regards

[neodave]

Please excuse my ignorance, but I'm just learning Mandrake 8.0. Are you saying that the Boot Loader in Linux will actually give me the opportunity to choose the HDD to load from? Is it similar to Boot Magic when it comes to choosing the OS on a 'single' partitioned HDD? (Only it will choose between two HDD.)
Thanks
Neodave

[KenKun]

Well, i didn`t use the LILO boot loader .. I triple boot win98, win2k and Mandrake .. i se Boot Magic .. so i can`t help describing to you how it works...
Here is quote from a nice installation article ... check step13 in the link ...

OH no Step 13! Now, you have to decide which boot loader to use: Grub, Lilo w/ graphics or Lilo w/o graphics. I'm most familiar with LILO, as it has been the standard for many years, but Grub is gaining popularity quickly. I decided to try out Grub this time around and it's not bad. Your first option, after choosing which boot loader, is the boot device. This corresponds to the place where the boot loader will be installed to: /dev/hda will be the MBR on the first hard drive residing on the primary IDE controller. Where as "/dev/hda1" would be the boot sector of the first partition of the first hard drive residing on the primary IDE controller. This can get a bit complicated if you have multiple hard drives with multiple partitions on each drive. You should be careful here if you are planning on dual booting WinNT/2K since Mandrake doesn't seem to be able to boot NTFS partitions reliably. On the other hand if you are going to dual boot Linux with Win9x then installing the Linux boot loader to the MBR is the way to go. Both LILO and Grub support booting FAT/FAT32 partitions and since Win9x doesn't have a boot loader of its own, Lilo/Grub is the only way. There are some third party boot loaders, which will work, but you can explorer those on your own time.

Check the full article here .. it is really helpful ...
http://www.littlewhitedog.com/reviews_other_00020.asp

Also this documentation site has a lot of infor that might interest you ..
http://www.mandrakeuser.org/docs/index.html..
Regards