Installing Knoppix on second HD without duel boot?

[spydie]

I have a winXP computer that I want to do a Knoppix HD install on.

WinXP is on a HD that is already installed.
I bought a second HD tonight to install Knoppix on.

Eveything I did a search on for installing with winXP came up with duel boot info.

I don't think I want to do a duel boot or have a option come up on the screen were the user can pick what OS to boot into.

I don't want my winXP (ntfs) to see HD2 with knoppix and when I'm running Knoppix from HD2 I don't wan't it to see HD1, winXP.

Do I have to set both HD's as Master and go into the BOIS each time and pick what it boots to or do I still set one HD as master and the other HD as slave?

My wife and son will be running winXP.

I want them to be able to turn the computer on and have it boot into winXP like it always has, so they won't even have a choise of picking win or knoppix.

So what's the best way to set up a Knoppix HD install on a second HD without duel boot option coming up on the screen?

I have done one Knoppix HD install on my older (slower) computer and really want to start running it on something much faster

Thanks!

[Stephen]

The easiest way is to put the second drive in the machine and install knoppix on it and decline the offer to install lilo to the MBR and make the boot floppy and use that to boot every time. You would just leave the XP drive as the first drive in the system so it would boot as normal and only linux when the floppy is used you may have to set the floppy to be checked for first in the boot order in the BIOS if it is not already set that way.

[spydie]

Well after doing some more reading and thinking about how I wanted to do things I went with the duel boot install.

After all if anyone else would boot into linux they need the password to log-in.

Anyway what I ended up doing was what I did on my older computer with a single drive.

I put the second drive in as slave (winXP as master) and checked the bios.
Everything auto detected in the bois so nothing much to do there.

Then I booted of the knoppix cd, opened the root console, typed knx-hdinstall.

I then partitioned my new hard drive.
hda1 boot 50Mb
hda2 root 38972Mb
hdb3 swap 1000Mb

Started copying all files
clicked "yes" to everything
Including installing lilo to MBR

Made a boot floppy.
Removed boot floppy.

Rebooted computer and I get a screen asking if I want to boot to win or linux

I can boot into both just fine.
Connect to the internet just fine on M$ or linux.

I just can not believe how well it went.
Most all the time if I start installing M$ stuff late at night when I'm really tired, everything goes wrong.

I have now run Knoppix live CD on two computer, did HD install on two computers, one a duel boot.

Knoppix has worked so great for me.
Installing it tonight was like a dream.
I'm expecting to wake up any minute now


I was running knoppix on a 333MHz 192 ram 4gig HD and still will be.
Tonight I did a knoppix HD install on my 1.8G 512 ram 40gig HD (winXP on it's own 40gig HD) and it's fast...

If anyone see's something I did wrong were I may run into trouble later on because of the way I installed, please let me know.

[Stephen]

The only thing I can see and it's nit-picking but the 38gb for / is way too large you should have saved about 33gb and put your /home partition on it in case you ever need to re-install and you do not want to loose your settings and personal data, oh and you do not really need a seperate /boot. You can also do the seperate /home with the new knoppix-installer.

[champagnemojo]

It surprises me how easy it is to install too Spydie. My dad thinks I understand Linux now I think...he was impressed I got it onto my laptop and dual-booting with XP. But like you say, Knoppix makes it so easy. Installing on the laptop was just as easy as on the desktop for me after throwing in a couple of cheat codes to make it boot. Looks like you did the install perfectly to me. knoppix-installer is the newer install script, but it's not really a big deal which one you use. The next time you install it give it a try though...it lets you choose the name for your user and such. And the debian-style install will install what knx-hdinstall did. I'm jealous though...your system is much faster than mine.

[champagnemojo]

The only thing I can see and it's nit-picking but the 38gb for / is way too large you should have saved about 33gb and put your /home partition on it in case you ever need to re-install and you do not want to loose your settings and personal data, oh and you do not really need a seperate /boot. You can also do the seperate /home with the new knoppix-installer.

Couldn't he burn his home directory onto a cd and keep them that way? I'm just curious...I have my /home directories on my main knoppix partition too.

[Cuddles]

Spydie,

The original idea you had, I did it.

I had Win98 on a 30gig HD, and
Knoppix on a 8gig HD, broken down to two partitions, /dev/hda1 was 7gig, and the swap was on /dev/hda5.

LILO was installed into the 8gig Knoppix HD - and I used the BIOS to switch between the 30gig and the 8gig boot.

Knoppix was even smart enough to realize that Windows was on my 30gig, and setup LILO to point to it, even though I just pointed the BIOS to the drives. This setup worked perfectly on my old system, a very old Gateway computer. My new system has Knoppix/Debian ONLY running on it.

Cuddles
[ps] Spydie, I am doing the HAPPY DANCE - I got the new computer working, w/ hardware modem, and my new systems unstable problem was due to incompatable memory. I also got the issues that I had with the old system - accounts not being Root couldn't get web pages up, the new system is now running perfectly - Root can get online, and get to the web, but also any other user account can do the same.

[spydie]

I created the small boot partition at the start of the disk to hold the kernel image. This is to avoid any possible problems with the bootloader not being able to find the kernel and therefore not able to boot the computer.

Creating a /home partition would have been a good idea. Looking back I should have done that.

I should be able save my /home to some type of removable media, but it would have been nice to save it to the hard drive and some type of removable media too.

Cuddles,
I'm glad to hear you got that new computer and hardware modem running.
I know what it's like having a new computer and not being able to get things working the way you want the first time around.