Im only 95% sure about this but unless you have a raid system you cant simpily slave a Hard drive from another and put an operating system on it.

The reason for this is that the BIOS will load a boot program that it has stored in your master boot record, here it will read your drives Volume Boot Code. This is what tells anything that wants to know the exact state of the disc, i.e how many partitions it has, how many o/s's are installed on it etc. This is where third party boot loaders are also stored (lilo).

The way you have configured your system however means that you will have two MBR's, with lilo obviously being on the linux hdd. The BIOS needs to be told this and what MBR to go to! By default it will go to the lowest lettered fixed drive and read that MBR (C drive).

So I would guess that you have windows on your C drive??

This is why linux is not being loaded, you can reconfigure it all day long but it wont ever load, hence when you take the windows drive out, the BIOS then goes to the linux drive MBR and loads linux!

There is three ways I can think of to get around this, either:

Get a Mother Board that supports RAID
Partition one drive and install both Operating Systems on this
Install Linux on your C drive, as this has LILO and will allow you to boot to windows if you want. As long as the BIOS loades the MBR with LILO in it you should be able to boot the second drive (maybe??) Im not to sure about this way as when LILO sends the boot instruction to the second drive it is still going to encounter a second MBR so it will either boot as normal (hopefully) or say, what the f*** is this doing here and crash!

You will have to experiment!

I would say partitioning the master hdd is the best answer, you can still assign space on the second hdd to each o/s, aslong as it is properly formated with the right file system (ntfs,ext2). You just need to have lilo in the MBR that the BIOS loads from.

So, if I was you, I would partition both drive 50/50 with NTFS and ext2, instal both O/S's on my C drive and then assign the remaining space on the second drive to each O/S!

Problem solved!!!!(hopefully!)

//edit: read my post here for more info on MBR's etc: http://www.antionline.com/showthread...hreadid=260546