I used to have redhat up and running with some bells and whistles about a year or two ago. I had a motherboard problem and replaced reformatted my drives and ended up using the bigger drive for XP that had Redhat on it due to dvd burning reasons for space and application software. When I switched all this around I formatted XP over linux for some retarded reason of space.
I now have my 120G drive with xp and two partitions. My slave drive is a 30G drive which I would like to put redhat 8.0 back onto. The problem is that windows is not recognizing my slave drive which at one point long ago it did. So I can't find the slave drive. Both drives are jumped correctly and on the cable in the right spots. I'm worried that if I start to install redhat 8 it might override my windows stuff and wipe my drive (I recall that one way or the other can't remember this could happen if installed in wrong order). Can I find my slave drive boot into it and just install redhat there or will the install find my slave drive and give me the option of were to put redhat if I can't locate drive at present time. I really want my Linux back just need it on the slave drive by itself. Can anyone help me with my hiding drive or will Linux notice it and not override my windows stuff.

Just make sure you choose "expert" mode for the rh install, that way you have control of which drive it installs to. And decide how you are going to boot before hand, grub or xp's bootloader. That way you know where to install grub, the mbr of the xp drive if you want grub as the primary bootloader or to the linux partition if your going to use xp for primary.

What's in this 30GB drive now? Is there any partitions or data?

If your win can't recognize your drive, it may be due to the drive not having partitions or filesystems in it. Yet, win won't recognize partitions with exotic filesystem (from win's point of view: ext3, reiser, xfs...).

A way to figure it out is to run some live cd, like knoppix or any other and see if it detects any storage volume.

Also, it can be due to bios problems. Did you try to go to bios and do a hdd detect?

Thanks kevinalm

I think that the 30G slave drive has XP on it still from the previous setup. How do I do a bios hard drive detect?

It varies from bios to bios.
Try to enter the bios setup and search for the option "Hdd auto detect". The screen where it lists the ide devices is a good candidate.

If the drive has the previous xp, the running xp was supposed to be able to see it.

I put the redhat 8.0 disc into the cd drive and started the install, it foung the missing drive (load to missing drive and only listed it, the slave drive). When the partition part came up I noticed three partitions on the missing slave drive. It had a ext3 swap and another ext3. So, I tried to go with it to not erase what I had if it was the previous linux drive. It stated no root drive set, so I stopped new install. Could it be possible that this is the drive that I had redhat on previously? Is there a way that I could somehow boot to this drive??? and see what OS is on it from before? I thought that ext3 had to do with linux.
Thanks Bob

"Could it be possible that this is the drive that I had redhat on previously?"

Yes, it could.

"and see what OS is on it from before? I thought that ext3 had to do with linux."

And it has, indeed.
the best way to check this out is to download and burn a live cd that you can boot and load from the cdrom and mount this drive to see what's on it. If you are comfortable with the command line, try system rescue cd (http://www.sysresccd.org/). Otherwise you can download knoppix or suse live eval, slax, etc...
Boot the cd, change to root and mount the drive. then you browse it and figure out what is it.

To boot from it, I'm not sure... There must be a way, but I don't know how.

Maybe Smart Boot Manager can help:

http://btmgr.sourceforge.net/

Linux boot disk.

Bingo
its there and still intact and fully functioning. I'm glad that I did not go ahead with installing the other day.
I had Lilo as previous boot loader. If xp is on my master HD, I have to put a copy of the Lilo boot loader onto the master C:\ drive for it to prompt me to choose which OS and drive to boot from Lilo correct. Redhat being on the slave won't prompt me with Lilo will it?
I will check into this at a later time, I have to mess with other things for now. I think that I have documentation on this somewhere, unless you guys know of how to conquer this off the top off your heads and have a minute.

Thanks for your help with this matter!

You have been great on responding to my forgotten knowledge and questions.

Bob

"its there and still intact and fully functioning."

How do you know? Could you boot it?

Did you use Smart Boot Manager? There's an option to re-scan the disks for boot records, in case you need. You might comfortably use it to boot whatever system you need, including this one, until you find exactly how to edit your current lilo/grub.

That's what I am doing with my newly installed Debian.

I used my linux boot disc, and my slave drive booted right up
into redhat 8.

I can get in as root or my user. From root I should be able to
change the lilo config correct. I can't seem to change the file
from inside of it.

Here's my current lilo boot file:

prompt
timeout=50
default=linux
boot=/dev/hda
map=/boot/map
install=/boot/boot.b
message=/boot/message
linear

image=/boot/vmlinuz-2.4.18-14
label=linux
initrd=/boot/initrd-2.4.18-14.img
read-only
append="hdc=ide-scsi root=LABEL=/"

other=/dev/hda1
optional
label=DOS

I was thinking of changing the some things to get lilo
to pop up on computer startup. Master is XP and slave is
now redhat Linux. So I was thinking that I could change the
hda setup now that the drives have been switched.

default=linux
boot=/dev/hda1

other=/dev/hda
optional
label=DOS

Does anyone think that this will work, or have any other ideas?
I need to get lilo to prompt for OS at startup. It is no longer
working because I switched my drives.
I tried to physically move the drives back to original (Linux drive
as master and XP as slave, but it asks for a bootmajic rescue disks
if I remember correctly. Anyways it wouldn't work.) So how do
I pull this off with Linux drive as a slave now and XP as the master?