At Fri, 17 Apr 2009 20:20:16 +0200 CentOS mailing list centos@centos.org wrote:
Robert Heller wrote on Fri, 17 Apr 2009 12:21:01 -0400:
If MS-Windows can't install itself on the first drive (as seen by the BIOS eg /dev/hda(1) or /dev/sda(1)), it won't install.
I think it can install the system to the other drive, but it will want to write the bootloader on the first drive. Which makes sense.
*MS-Windows*
(AFAIK) simply won't install itself anyplace but C: (at least for the core system).
You confuse that. Windows will name the system partition as C:, but that doesn't mean you can install it only on the first partition. If you have four primary partitions you can install four versions of Windows.
More specificly, MS-Windows *seems* to need to be installed somewhere on BIOS drive 0x80 (the first drive). Older BIOSs would call this (whole) drive 'C:', even if it had multiple partitions (which would end up as C:, D:, etc. in a MS-Windows world).
When I was trying (way back when in the 1990s) to install NT 4.0 on a second (physical) SCSI disk, the NT 4.0 installer was calling it C:, but the installer was failing *after* formatting it. It was giving 'strange' and 'confusing' error messages. It appeared that the installer just did not know how to deal with the hardware situation it found: a full partition 1st drive, with all partitions of types MS-Windows did not understand (eg Linux file systems, etc.) and an available 2nd drive partitioned and formatted for MS-Windows. I suspect this is a situation not expected by the writers of the installer -- part of Microsoft 'arogance' -- eg there is no other operating system but MS-Windows. I wouldn't expect MS-Windows XP to be any different, but don't really know. After that experience with NT 4.0 I have avoided all contact with MS-Windows (any version).
Kai