Two HDD Installation Opinions...

[RottynDawg]

I am very new to the linux scene and fascinated by Gentoo; yes there are easier distros to start with but what fun is that?

The primary HDD in my system is full so I added a second HDD as the secondary master. The Gentoo 2005.1 LiveCD does not like my Plextor 712A SATA drive so I used the Knoppix 4.01 DVD to install Gentoo on the secondary master. When it came time to configure GRUB, I scratched my head and read HOWTO and forum information for two nights straight. I've read so much that it is all starting to look the same so I wanted to get recommendations from veteran users on which approach I should take that would leave Windows intact on the primary master and allow me to dual-boot with the following HDD setup:

hda1 Windows XP Professional
hda2 NTFS storage

hdc1 Gentoo boot
hdc2 Gentoo swap
hdc3 Gentoo root

1. Keep reading up on GRUB until I figure out how to configure it to boot from hda and give me my OS choices.
2. Forget GRUB in this scenario and use the NT Bootloader to dual-boot.
3. Format hdc as NTFS, move the data from hda2 to hdc and proceed with a more "normal" dual-boot single-drive setup.
4. Some other clever option.

I am open to any suggestions, advice, pointers, etc. that do not require me to reformat hda1 and start from scratch as that would only take time away from learning Gentoo

[maglomanic]

Son if you already know about the partition mapping (hda1 is hd0,0 for Grub)...then you need to read about drive mapping.
looks something like this
(hd0)(hd1)
(hd1)(hd0)

it was a long time ago that i did it (and i m just a noob myself)
but i guess you need that since your primary MBR is the same as the disk that has windowsXP. be very careful with stuff that seems trivial but wont make it work for you. like the space betwen root and (hd#,#)..i dont know if it's a known issue here but it has cause alot of trouble for me. also you need to know the difference betwen.... root and rootnoverify
if grub knows about the FS on the partition that has the target OS then it is root if it doesnt know about the file system then it's rootnoverify..also i read in a install doc that root is for genkernel and rootnoverify is for other kernels.

just check on all this info.
Good luck
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The question is always "how" and not "why"

[RottynDawg]

Thank you for the pointers maglomanic. I'll read up on drive mapping and root/rootnoverify this weekend to see what I come up with; they sound very interesting.

Thanks again...