Installing Gentoo

BattleGnome · n00b Joined: 28 Oct 2004 Posts: 4

Heard this a while back with other linux installations and want to know if its still the case.

Can Gentoo linux be installed on the secondary hdd?

slycordinator · Advocate Joined: 31 Jan 2004 Posts: 3065 Location: Korea

Gentoo can be installed to any HD you want as long as it's recognized and given a /dev location

racoontje · Veteran Joined: 19 Jul 2004 Posts: 1290

True. Gentoo can be installed anywhere. Remember that you mount the install partition yourself. This can be /dev/hda[n] or /dev/hdb[n] (or sd[x][n], if you use SCSI/SATA).

I'm assuming you're going to double boot?

Griswold · Apprentice Joined: 26 Aug 2004 Posts: 212

Like they said, gentoo can be installed on any harddrive you wish, however, if you are dual-booting gentoo/windows, i would suggest the following:

make whatever harddrive you want windows to be on the first harddrive and install windows. Now, physically swap the two harddrives (the one for gentoo and the one for windows) so that gentoo is the first harddrive now. Then install gentoo, and use grub as your bootloader. Now, for the windows portion of the grub.conf, make it look like this:

title=Windows
map (hd0) (hd1)
map (hd1) (hd0)
rootnoverify (hd1,0)
chainloader +1

This will make gentoo the first harddrive, and as such grub wont screw up the ntldr (the bootloader that windows uses to boot). So is something happends to the gentoo harddrive, you can still use windows. However, windows wants to always be the first harddrive/partition. the two map lines above will trick windows into thinking that it is the first harddrive by dynamically remapping the two harddrives in the bios. So, the end result is that linux knows its the first harddrive, windows thinks it is, and will act and function just fine. Also, if something happends to gentoo/grub, you may still boot into windows, and if something happends to windows, you may boot into gentoo. This makes everything work togehter really well.