Quote Originally Posted by MobilePCPhysician
You need to leave the primary hard drive hooked up ( the one with windows )
Suse will load a boot loader to the drive and allow you to choose which operating system to boot to. If you leave the windows drive out and install Suse, and then re-connect it after the Suse install, you will need to create a Suse boot disk to be able to access the install..

I understand but the object isn't to every have both drives running at the same time.... I have used boot loaders in the past to dual boot. THink of it as a trial run. I want to find out how well the linux will run on this system. If it can do the things I need it to i will finish the backing up i have already started on the main drive and then redo the drive completely. If it doesn't work I want to be able to just unhook the linux and plug in the old drive and go from there... I don't want to physically remove the current drive as the cabling and mounting took some acrobatics and especially right now my hands aren't up to doing it again... I just wanted to know if it can be done.... is this a fair test for linux.... could trying to boot from the secondary master cause problems that wouldn't be there otherwise? If this is a bad idea I'll just have to wait until i can come up with another computer that isn't a compaq......