Installing CentOS 5.4 on second hard hrive with Windows 7 on first

[alankar]

Hi All,

I recently bought a system with two hard drives. Here is the details of the system:

1. First drive: WDC WD3200AAKS-75L9A0 (ATA controller, channel 0)
2. Second drive: WDC WD3200AAKS-75L9A0 (ATA controller, channel 1)

The first drive which has Windows 7 64 bit is main drive. The second drive is a data drive.

No RAID

I want to install CentOS 5.4 on the second drive. I want Windows 7 as primary OS with dual boot possible to Linux. Could anybody help me out on this ?

Thanks,

[abednegoyulo]

Just a suggestion.

If your mobo/bios supports pressing a function key to go to a boot menu, then you might try:

1 Disable the drive where your window$ is installed. Maybe pulling the power plug would do the trick.
2 Install CentOS on the second hard drive without worrying about to where you will be installing grub
3 After installation, plug the power of the drive where window$ is installed.

In order for you to boot to the desired drive, you must select the appropriate drive in the boot menu that your mobo/bios provides. The reason why I suggested this is because it will save you time when one drive fails, or the MBR gets messed up. This is my preferred way of dual booting when I have two hard drives that does not need to be in RAID. Maybe somebody have some better idea.

[pschaff]

Disclaimer: I neither have nor wish to get any experience with Windows 7 nor Vista. The following technique works with XP had has been reported to work with Vista. Don't see why it would not work with 7, but let us know if you try it.

If there's nothing you care about on the second drive, I'd just do a standard install, deselect the first drive at the disk selection stage, let the anaconda installer remove alll partitions on the second drive, do a default install using the second drive only, and overwrite the MBR on the boot drive with GRUB. In the installer the Windows install should be detected and a GRUB entry "Other" created. I usually change that to something more descriptive, and you can make it the default by selecting the appropriate check box in the GUI installer.

[alankar]

Hi,

I have 8 GB RAM on my system and want to install a 64 bit OS. Should I simply download the x86_64 option from this website ?

[pschaff]

Yes, or to be exact, download from a [url=https://www.centos.org/modules/tinycontent/index.php?id=15]Mirror[/url].

[alankar]

Hi,

I disabled the second the drive with Windows 7 and installed CentOS5.4 on the second drive. I remember I carefully selected the second drive for linux and the setup selected the grub partition by itself along with dual boot options. After linux installation and reboot it did not show any dual boot screen. In fact it said there was no operating system on the first drive. Is it because of overwrite of MBR for Windows ?

I should mention I did not have any non-formatted (free space) for grub. Is that why it happened? I would like to know if I could see the dual boot screen with or with out re-installing either OS.

Thanks,

[alankar]

Thanks. It worked. I was ignoring something.

I would like to know if could mount the drive 2 on Windows 7 drive because when I see the drives in Windows, it is not showing the one with Linux and Linux is showing the one with Windows.

[pschaff]

Windows does not know about Linux ext3 without additional drivers. I have no idea if those are available for Windows 7. For access to NTFS from CentOS see the [url=http://wiki.centos.org/TipsAndTricks/NTFS]Wiki article on NTFS[/url].

[alankar]

Hi,

I need to install 32-bit term cap package. Could anybody send me a link for download and procedure to install.

Thanks,

[AlanBartlett]

[quote]
I need to install 32-bit term cap package. Could anybody send me a link for download and procedure to install.
[/quote]
Let's check --

[code]
$ uname -mi
i686 i386
$ rpm -qf /etc/termcap
termcap-5.5-1.20060701.1
[/code]
So just --

[code]
[b]yum install termcap[/b]
[/code]
What could be more simple? :-)