Harold Henderson wrote:
This week I'd like to put in some hard drives &configure them with grub ( or is it lilo?)
Either. A lot of people are beginning to migrate to grub. One of it's advantages is that if you've got something wrong in your grub configuration, you can edit it from the boot prompt. With lilo, you either get the lilo configuration right the first time, or you find some other way to boot the system.
lilo has been the default for so long that it's easier to find documentation and get it running; however, I myself am beginning to prefer grub, and suspect that it may in the future become the default for Debian (although that's just a suspicion; I have no insight into the minds of the developers/maintainers who would make that decision).
Is it possible to have Debian 3.0 on the primary hard drive, windows98 on the second and Mandrake on the third? I do have three hard drives that are 7.8 so they are too small to partition each. The only thing I can think of is to have Debian's bootloader taking care of all three. Well, I can do this with three windows98 harddrives but I'mgoing to need some assistance with this project.By the way, I was told by someone on theMandrake mailing list that windows can't go on the second hard drive.
It has been my experience that Windows "prefers" to be on the first hard drive. I've read on this list that (at least some versions of) Windows can go on other drives/partitions, but that you have to do some "magic" in the BIOS/lilo configuration or somesuch. I vaguely remember a claim that such magic can be accomplished with lilo, but not with grub.
If it were me, I'd put Windows on the first drive, just to keep it happy, and then put D & M on the other drives.
You can use lilo or grub (or conceivably Window's boot process - I know it was possible in Win95; not sure about 98) to boot any of the three OSes. Even if Windows is on the first drive, lilo/grub can go into the MBR, at the very beginning of the first drive. In other words, you don't have to have Debian on the first drive just because you've got Debian's boot loader on the first drive; you can mix & match the OSes, because the MBR is sort of like a different partition on the drive. Windows will boot fine if it doesn't own the MBR (as long as the MBR has a sufficient boot loader to boot into Windows); however, when you reinstall/upgrade/repair Windows, it'll try to reclaim the MBR with its own boot loader code. Thus, you'll want to install Windows first, then when Debian/Mandrake get installed, the Windows-owned MBR can be rewritten by lilo/grub.
Hope this helps. Kent