[Herefordshire] VectorLinux Finally installed !!

[EdwardFW at aol.com]

Greetings and thanks to all for welcoming me and tolerating the increase in 
the group's average age and its decrease in average intelligence and Linux 
ability

Re Andrew's desire for speed and for seperate drives, I have had great 
benefits both re bootable operating system drives and back-up and generally shifting 
lots of MB about, from using caddies - but I am still on PATA, no SATA. There 
must be people on the internet who have tried SATA though.

I too like the idea of seperate drives for seperate operating systems and 
have been facing up to hard drive technology stopping me from using caddies. But 
I thought you Linux people - we Linux people - were always booting to and from 
all sorts of things and places. Can't the loader thing be configured to 
ignore drives etc?

Or - on one PC I have a normal IDE as the main boot drive. Second "drive" is 
a Promise PCI RAID card which pretends to be a SCSI card but has (in my case 
two) IDE drives connected to it. Using RAID 0 this gives a fast drive. I have 
also loaded W98 onto it and can boot to it by changing the boot sequence in the 
BIOS to SCSI,  A, C. 

Andrew if you had a similar PCI RAID card setup or a (genuine) SCSI drive on 
a SCSI card (or off the motherboard if it has SCSI on it) your BIOS would 
surely allow you to change the boot sequence. 

If the BIOS would also allow you to disable the SCSI / card, or the IDE, so 
the relevant drives could sit there not recognised when you booted to the other 
O/S would this be a solution? Or 

I haven't looked lately but simple raid cards should not cost much now or do 
you have it on your motherboard?

Advantage - files and images could be swapped depending on filesystem 
recognition. 

Disadvantages - the drives you had disabled the recognition of would be still 
be spinning and thus ageing, and using power and creating heat.
(On my system both drives are all part of the working boot, swap file, 
backup, day to day working)
And, possibly, using up a PCI slot. 
And having to nip into the BIOS to make a change but this is quick once you 
get practiced at it. 

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