Hi. I am trying to install Mandrake 9.2 for the first time, but when I get to the point of choosing harddrive I am stuck with not knowing WHICH harddrive is WHICH. I have 3 harddrives on Windows XP (currently labelled as C: D: and E:) Every time I do a new Windows installation on another drive, my computer(or windows?) changes the drive names automatically, without me having any control over it.
For example: Until last week i had two harddrives, windows on E: and another one C:. Then I put a new harddrive in and it got recognized as F. Then i installed a new windows on F. During that new installation old E: became new C: old C: became new D: and old F: became new E:. This has confused me many times but my solution always was to remember the size used and left on the harddrives to know which one is which and to installl onto the harddrive I wanted.


NOW in Mandrake it gives me the options hda, hdb, and hdd. (Why is there no hdc??? ) but it does not tell me correctly the size free and used on each drive like windows does. Two harddrives appear to be empty. i know this is not true.

So my question is how can i find out which is which? I guess I cannot just believe that C: is hda D: is hdb and E: is hdd. Right?

My desire is just to install Mandrake onto my harddrive C: while I have windows on E: now , and hopefully achieve dual boot option.

I know this may sound stupid for many of You, but I spent hours on the net trying to find answers without success. Mandrakes's official installation guide does not explain this either.

I would really appreciate any help on this.

You may have a control over it, it's present in XP PRO, as far as I remember it's called "Partition management" or smth. like this. It also gives you a possibility to see which drive is which.




hda is "master device attached to primary IDE channel".
hdb is "slave device attached to primary IDE channel".
hdc is "master device attached to secondary IDE channel" ( I strongly suspect that you have a CD-ROM or smth attached there, and not a harddisk ).
hdd is "slave device attached to secondary IDE channel".
The most chances are that hda corresponds to your C: disk, hdb - to your D:, and hdc to your E:. But you better check it with Windows partition manager.

Wow I'm confused just reading the description! As you've already guessed the names given to drives in Windows and Linux are not always connected. The letters assigned by windows describe partitions not actual drives. In Linux hda would be a drive, while hda1, hda2, etc would be the partitions on that drive. There are several reasons why you might not have a hdc, it could for instance be that hdc is your CD-ROM drive.

None of that really helps does it? What might is that hda is normally the master drive on the primary IDE channel, hdb is normally the slave drive. Then hdc would be master on the secondary channel, and so on. You might be able to work out which partition each is based upon that.

EDIT:
umm I've just repeated what Chalex20 said, but he hadn't said it when I started to type. Grrrr

thanks for the info ...hda is primary master... so i figured out what harddrive to install.
I did install Mandrake 9.2 with fatal consequences which i explain in a new topic...(!!!)