Slack 10- LILO on SATA MBR?

[vwgtiturbo]

Hello all, I have 2 SATA drives, one with WinXP SP2 on it, and one IDE drive. I just built this system a couple of weeks ago, and am now wanting to put Slack on it. I was thinking about trying to load Slack 10 on the parallel drive, but was wondering if LILO will be able to write to the MBR of the first SATA drive. Or, will I have to set the BIOS to boot off of the IDE drive, then somehow set GRUB to read the first SATA to boot Win? Would I need to setup Slack to completely support SATA, just to write to the SATA MBR? I guess I could just put Slack next to Win on the SATA drive, but I like to keep them on separate drives, so that if one drive craps out and takes the OS with it, I can still access my files with the other OS. Any recommendations?

[paradox]

My guess is that you would have to set Slack up to support SATA if you want to read write from it. I haven't had the pleasure of playing with serial drives yet, so I don't know if GRUB/LILO will write to an SATA and still boot an IDE, I would guess yes, but don't take my word on that. Most bios's these days let you choose the drive that you want to originally boot from, so I would look into that if I were you.

Aragorn

[SkyNet]

From my understanding, you have WinXP SP2 on one SATA drive, and want to put Slackware on the other SATA drive and are worried that GRUB wont boot it.

Since you aren't really dealing with partitions then you need not worry about which comes first, and from what I can tell it's a simple matter of telling the BIOS to use the SATA drive with Linux on it so it will boot grub, and you can easly have a Windows selection in there that will start up the Windows SATA drive.

To me that seems like the best option. Mainly because you don't have to overwrite the Windows MBR since it's on it's SATA drive. You simply point the BIOS to the Linux drive with GRUB and have it boot everything.

[babbing]

I was under the impression that having a mixed SATA and IDE system was a bad thing. I was told that one or the other was seen by the system, but not both at once. Is this not true?

[vwgtiturbo]

The system has 3 drives:
1. SATA 1: 120gb WinXP SP2 Drive
2. SATA 2: 160gb Backups (this goes without saying, when you are running Windows ;D )
3. 160gb IDE drive, with my webserver.

Drive 3 has the room, and I was leaning on putting Slack on it, but since I may have to get SATA working with it anyway, I may put it on SATA 1 with Win. The only downside to that is that if that drive goes out, I have to reinstall both systems. If they are on separate drives, I can lose one OS, and still use the other. I may put it on SATA 1 just to keep the system organized. I would have liked to try a RAID stripe with Win and Lin, but I honestly have no idea how to get it to work with one OS, much less two. I haven't really looked into it seriously.
I would think that even if I had Slack on the IDE drive that I would have to setup it up to see SATA drives, right? Even if I boot off of the IDE, and GRUB had an entry to boot Win on the SATA drive, it has to have some way of knowing that the SATA device even exists, right? Maybe I am just one confused dude...

[trommaster]

Just put grub on whatever drive the system boots from and it should work
might have to do a little research at a grub prompt to work out what identifications the drives have - remember there is tab completion, so just do (hd<tab> and it should tell you the names of them