need help to install debian on windows machine

Benjamin Kwiecien

2007-01-30 02:09:27 UTC

You are definitely going to want to use GRUB--no question about it. It's
newer and more advanced than LILO. It also happens to be more convenient
to use. :)

What you want to do is just tell the Debian installer to use the second
hard drive. Your hard drives are probably going to be called "hda" and
"hdb", the former being your primary hard drive. Double check the size
of the drives to make sure that they are labeled the way we expect (you
never know which order the hard drives are wired to the bus).

When the installer asks, tell to put GRUB on the primary hard drive in
the boot sector and to install Linux on your whole secondary drive. It
should do this for you automatically.

After you have installed both Linux and GRUB, you can check to see which
system it's booting automatically. If Windows is not the automatic choice,
you will just have to make a quick, simple edit to your grub.conf file in
Linux.

As far as what you need to know about your system, Linux should be able to
detect your hardware automatically. You already know everything you need
in order to do the install.

In order to do a net install, you will need to be connected to the internet.

Ben

Post by GateKeeper
I have a 250 GB hard drive, with a large NTFS partition (Windows XP),
and a smaller FAT32 partition (Recovery files for the Windows
installation). The computer is connected to the internet via a Belking
router and cable internet connection.
I also have a second, 10GB drive, which has no OS installed. I want to
install a Debian "netinst" distro on the 10GB drive, and set up the
machine to dual boot. How can I do this safely? I have been reading up
online, and I can't get seem to get a clear grasp on the issues. I did
this once before, but I used a single hard drive, and I screwed up the
Windows boot in the process.
How do I use the netinst to install Debian? What information will I need
to have beforehand? (The man pages left me feeling as if I had almost
understood...)
How do I install in such a way that Windows is still the default
installation, but I can boot Linux if I so desire? I think I want to use
GRUB instead of LILO, but I'm open to suggestions.