I have one SATA drive with windows xp installed. I added a second SATA drive to install CentOS on. During the install, both drives are listed. If I use the auto-partition feature and deselect the drive with windows on it, only selecting the new drive, I get an error message that it could not create the partitions. The same thing happened a few months ago and I manually setup to partitions. This worked, but windows wouldn't boot any longer. The last time I tried this was with CentOS 4.0. I'm reluctant to mess up the windows install and want to dual boot. Searching the web brought up alot of info, but I'm still confused as to whether this should work. I'm using an Abit AN8 motherboard with no ATA hard drives, but an ATA cdrom drive (used for the install). Any feedback is greatly appreciated. Thanks. mark markworkman@woh.rr.com ps. I do have a 3ware SATA card I could put in if that would make things easier.
Your computer has one Master Boot Record on the boot drive (that is the Primary Master drive, the one that you currently have Windows on).
You will need to manually setup the partitions on the second drive.
When you get finished, CentOS will be installed on the second drive ... but the boot loader (grub) will be installed on the MBR of the boot drive.
As part of the setup, windows should be listed as a boot option ... if you use the arrow key on the Grub selection screen:
http://shots.osdir.com/slideshows/slideshow.php?release=272&slide=20
If windows is not listed, login to centos and edit your /boot/grub/grub.conf file and add this entry to the bottom of the file:
#---start below here---# title Windows rootnoverify (hd0,0) chainloader +1 #---stop above here---#
If you add those 3 lines, you should see "Windows" as an option on the grub selection screen.
If you want to see all the options every boot up, in that same file (/etc/grub/grub.conf), you should remark out (put a # in front of) the line that says:
hiddenmenu
so it looks like this:
#hiddenmenu
Thanks for your help. This worked as you said that it would.