Bootloader and Boot Order
 

I am installing Gentoo on a second hard drive on my Athlon 64 box. The question I have is this: Instead of having to overwrite the MBR on the windows drive (HDD-0), can I load Grub on the MBR of the second HDD (HDD-1), the Gentoo HDD, and set the bios to boot from HDD-1 instead of HDD-0? That second drive is set to Slave on IDE-0. Im not sure it will work, but its worth a shot, rather than risking screwing up the Windows drive.

Also, IIRC, isnt there a utility on the XP install CD to rewrite that MBR in case you screw it up doing something like what I am? I seem to remember using it a long time ago, but cant remember what it was called...

Yes, putting a MBR on the second drive will be fine in linux.

If you type fdisk /mbr it should "re-initialize" the master boot record of the harddrive.

Yes, but what about Windows? I need to be able to boot both Windows and Linux--would my idea of putting the bootloader on the second drive and telling the bios to boot from it work?

For windows? I thought there was a specialized microsoft utility on the windows CD to reinstall the window bootloader if you fscked it up... Guess that will work too, though!

There is a program to fix the mbr on the windows xp install cd when you boot with the CD and choose to repair using recovery console. Can't remember what it's called something like fixboot or fixmbr, just type help at the command prompt to see all the programs you have accessible.

installing on the slave works just fine, i've done it with SuSe, Mandrake, Redhat, and Fedora. Just stay away from lilo, grub is much more stable. hope this helps

As far as bootloaders go, I would recommend looking into BeOS. You don't have to install the OS (unless you want to fall in love) but Bootman the bootloader is bonehead easy to set up.