dual boot advice

[Man-wai Chang]

> Currently I have an IDE port for the Windows drive and a SATA controller
> for the linux drives, but most new motherboards have only SATA ports.
> There is considerable confusion on the web about installing XP on SATA
> drives, some talk about needing a floppy w/ the SATA driver, some talk
> about disabling AHCI in BIOS before loading XP.

For simplicity's sake, set the SATA mode in BIOS to IDE first, then 
install both OSs. I suggest you install WinXP first, then SuSE. AHCI was 
not available when WinXP came out. I think WinXP SP3 got it, not too sure.

After that, you could enable AHCI support in WinXP, install necessary 
drivers, then set the SATA mode in BIOS to AHCI. There should be no need 
to install AHCI module for Linux (for recent kernels).

Should you made a mistake and failed to boot XP, don't panic, just set 
the SATA mode back to IDE and it should be fine.

A better way to install WinXP with AHCI enabled is to use nLite to 
slip-stream all necessary drivers, service packs, and updates with your 
WinXP CDROM to build a new ISO. Then you can set SATA mode to AHCI and 
install WinXP from the specially made ISO directly.

Anyway, since you maybe formatting some partitions to install the two 
OSs, you better back up your data first.

Have fun!

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