Installation to dedicated disk

[Gary W. Swearingen]

Alan McKinnon <alan at linuxholdings.co.za> writes:

> On Monday 01 May 2006 05:58, Chanchao wrote:
>> Then when installing Dapper: It will overwrite your windows boot
>> menu. But that's okay, boot from your windows install CD, go to the
>> 'repeair' option where you get a console prompt and let 'fixmbr'
>> and 'fixboot' do their stuff.
>
> No no no that's completely wrong. It leaves no way to boot Linux. Why 
> install Linux only to then make it unbootable?

So one can later configure one's preferred boot loader to boot Linux.
I hope we can still tolerate user choice in such matters.  Even bad ones.

> fixmbr puts the MS MBR back on the drive, obliterating grub
> fixboot reinstalls the NT loader on the Windows boot partition
>
> What the user wants in this case is to include this stanza 
> in /boot/grub/grub.conf or menu.lst:

Which ignores what the OP actually said he wanted:

   I want to ensure that Lilo, or Grub for that matter, installs only
   to the second, ubuntu disk and leaves my Windows boot sector alone:
   I will use the Windows XP Boot Loader to get to ubuntu.

It good of people to provide alternative suggestions, etc, but it
would be even better to answer the questions that are asked first,
or at least acknowledge the asked question instead of ignoring it.

The OP then asked:

   Is it possible for me to be assured that this is possible, and that
   the Dapper Drake installation routine will be sufficiently explicit
   so as to militate against accidents?

Which I interpreted to mean: Will the installer always allow me to
skip the first-disk-MBR overwritting operation (or put it on a
different disk) or does it try to be "user friendly" and do the MBR
automatically.  I didn't (and still don't) know what to tell him.

(Not that the OP is still paying attention to this thread.)