Dual boot windows/linux with 2 harddrives on a Dimension 8400

Question

hey everyone,
i just bought a 40gig sata drive and in stalled it to my system so that i can intsall linux on it. on my original harddrive i have windows xp, and i want to be able to turn off the windows harddrive and run the linux harddrive, and vice versa, so that i can leave windows compeletly intact, as im running out of room on the windows hd and I would rather have them seperate. I believe 40gig is installed right because when i ran the linux setup i installed it only on that harddrive, and i set the linux mrb to be only on that hard drive also, but when i try to switch to the linux hard drive is says that it cant find the hard drive. when i enable all the sata drives in the bios besides the windows drive(so the 3 other drives) it says that it cant find 2, which means that the linux drive is being reconized to some degree. I just cant figure out how to get it to boot the linux drive. I have an older dimension that doesnt use sata drives and it works perfectly on that system, i can just enable one drive and disable the other.

ejn63 · Answer

Check with the publisher of your linux distribution about support for the SATA controller on the 8400 system. If the distribution is more than a year or so old, you'll likely have to rebuild the kernel to support it.

ryn1727 · Answer

thanks for the reply, the distro is suse 10 so im pretty sure that it supports sata, any other ideas?

TomXPS · Answer

May be an issue with you BIOS setting try a Non RAID setting. With RAID setting you need a RAID driver.

Another option which I use, for running multiple OS is virtual OS software. Using Microsoft Virtual PC, to run other OS. The Virtual software works well but 2 GB of memory or more is best.

ryn1727 · Answer

i just tried playing around with the bios and this is what i got.

I reinstalled suse 10 just in case and now when i enable the linux drive it has the drive details. No matter which setting i put the bios in (RAID Autodetect/AHCI, RAID Autodetect/ATA, RAID on, or Combination i got the same error screen upon booting

No boot device available-
strike F1 to retry boot, F2 for setup utility

any other ideas?

TomXPS · Answer

Have you tried swapping the two SATA cables to see if you can boot off the second drive without doing it through the BIOS.   Could leave your Windows Disk disconnected.

ryn1727 · Answer

i tried sawping the drives so the linux drive is running off sat0 but it still said it couldnt find the drive, i would have thouhgt that would work too. Is there any way i can install the driver on the hard drive so the bios reads it, before i installed linux the harddrive came pre formated with stuff on it, was one of the partitions the raid driver?

TomXPS · Answer

Not sure what of been on the drive.    Usually when you buy a new drive they have no data or partions on them.   I assume you system came with 1 SATA drive and you added another ?   Normally when I ever installed Linux I installed it from the CD drive by booting off the CD ROM.   Is this the way you did it ?   May want to re-format the second drive with Linux.     The BIOS setting seem to me the only think that would prevent Linux from working and you already tried that.   May be the version does not support SATA drives.   Anyway the version I using is booted off a Virtual PC so have no issues.   Good luck.

Storage, Drives & Media

Dual boot windows/linux with 2 harddrives on a Dimension 8400

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