On 11 Sep 99, at 11:35, Timothy B. Schryer wrote:

>   I am interested in learning about Red Hat Linux and my plan is
> to add an older hard drive (WD Caviar 2340, 340 MB) as a second
> hard drive on my HP PII 400, and then install Linux on that drive.
> Is this the best approach?

  I'm extremely sympathetic to the economic attractiveness of running
multiple OSes on a single machine.
  However, rebooting back-and-forth several times a day gets old
pretty quickly.  If you make heavy daily use of the machine, a second
PCs a better approach.  [Note that Linux runs fine on a 486, and may
not have support for all of the very latest peripherals.]

  The other issue is that the boot code in the system ROM can
typically only boot from a partition within the first 1024 cylinders
of the first hard drive -- putting an OS on another drive *may* not
work.  [It's possible that as long as LILO is installed to meet this
condition, Linux itself can be located elsewhere -- I'm not certain.
Also, you can get a bit of extra flexibility if you can change
controller boot order, say between IDE and SCSI.]

  What you propose is an attractive option, and (if it works) it may
be the best you can afford right now.

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