I have a feeling Im gonna be stuck in the newb forum for a long time yet...

How do I create a boot disk? The one I made in setup doesnt seem to work (because I updated linux?). its because I wanna copy the bootsect.lnx file to a MS-DOS formatted floppy so I can stick it on my main hard drive and set up a dual boot. It seems to work ok apart from the boot file seems corrupted... any advice appreciated

Also what do you think is the best mail handler, and are there any that support HTTP based mail services? Any other recommended programs that will be useful? Is redhat very prone to viruses? Thought I might as well ask a few questions while Im here...

Thanks,

As far as viruses, Linux on the whole (no matter the distribution) is not very "prone" to viruses. It's just that secure and the ones that do exist, don't do a whole lot. A good firewall script is where you want to start as far as security goes in keeping out the crackers...As for the bootdisk, open a terminal, become superuser by typing su then root password and run makebootdisk.

thanks for all that

erm another problem: when I have the hard drive with Linux installed, enabled (urgh this is hard to phrase) and boot windows 2000, the computer runs very slowly, but when I have that hard drive unplugged, windows 2000 runs normally. Is there any way to prevent this? And what causes it?

It's possible when they use differnet transmission speeds. You can prevent this using different cables (one drive: primary master, the second one secondary master).

This is the exact reason I use my drives on seperate controllers as Mara comments here. eg. My cd-burner runs ALOT faster on the sec. master when making an .iso etc,... than on the primary with my HD. Seek times and what have you are picky. If you have two drives on a controller and one does 33 & another will do 66, they will both default to the slower speed eg. 33.

Yeah I see what you're saying, but how come this didnt ever make a difference til I installed linux on the 2nd hard drive? I used to keep all my mp3 on that drive, and it didnt make any difference to perfomance. Now windoze takes about 10 minutes (literally) between typing the password to log on, and loading the startup progs... So Im guessing theres more to it than which controller each drive's on?

Current setup:

Primary Master: 40Gb HDD, windoze 2000
Primary Slave: Lite-on CD re/writer
Secondary Master: old nackered 32x NEC CD-ROM drive
Secondary Slave: old, but functional Maxtor (urgh) 6Gb HDD, redhat 7.3

but like I said, the problems have only appeared since I installed linux

Ive got the 6 gig unplugged atm

Well, if the second drive be THAT old and you are using a bloated distro like RH 7.3 it may bog...But i'd think it more likely that the drive is just getting old and slowing things down, hence the reason things speed up when you unplug it.

OS that's not running won't affect the other one. I agree with taz.devil.

Yeah I see what your saying, but I mean really really slow... thingy went fine with just 4 gig of mp3 on the day before, but with linux there it was taking about 15 minutes to boot win2k.

Could it be that windoze is trying to get data about the drive type and stuff, and the file system is unreadable? the computer freezes up when I try to view the contents of my computer, thats why i think this.... Im not trying to be awkward lol its just a pain in the arse when I have to unplug the HDD every time I wanna use windoze (the frequency of which is rapidly decreasing )

Thanks

It may be Windows trying to detect the second drive. An reinstallation of Windows may help (it has somewhere in its settings that there's second drive). It cannot read Linux partition without extra software, so it may help.