Install with AMD Athlon FX-62 and Asus M2N-E-SLI

[psychotropic]

Ok, so here's my specs: I have an Asus M2N-E SLI nForce 500 Socket AM2 Motherboard, AMD Athlon FX-62 CPU running at 2.8Ghz, 4GB of RAM, and Diamond Radeon X1550 512MB PCIe graphics card with 19in Widescreen Samsung LCD. I have Windows XP Professional x64 installed on a 300GB IDE drive and openSUSE 10.3 Gnome installed on a 120GB IDE drive (partitioned three ways, root, swap, and a third one unformatted for which I have no idea what's it's purpose serves) dual booting using GRUB. I have a spare 500GB SATA drive laying around that, obviously because I have an nForce chipset, can never use to install Mac OS X 10.5.2 on. So here's my plan:

 

I want to leave the 120GB drive with my openSUSE install intact because I want no part of trying to reinstall all that.

 

I will use Microsoft Backup and clone my Windows XP x64 install from the 300GB IDE drive to the 500GB SATA drive and hopefully just boot from this.

 

I will partition the 300GB IDE drive leaving 50-100GB of unformatted space for Mac OS X (Kalyway 10.5.2) and the rest NTFS for storage as the Doctor Who episodes I like to download start to become space intensive after so long.

 

I'm aware that switching out the 300GB IDE drive with the 500GB SATA drive will require me going into the F8 boot menu and making it the first drive.

 

Here are the problems I forsee: GRUB won't see Windows on the new hard drive and then I won't be able to boot into Windows and because I'm not exactly sure which drive GRUB sits on (I think the linux drive) I may currupt everything.

 

I already tried this install using the SATA drive and it just freezes at the Kalyway welcome screen, but does stuff when I plugged into my busted 20GB IDE drive (doesn't read or write, but will at least recognize itself as a drive).

 

Eventually, I'd like to multiboot to Mac OS from the GRUB boot loader.

 

To me, logically this all sounds like it could work. If anything else fails, I have a few external hard drive enclosures and my Windows XP Tablet PC Edition laptop has ext3 read/write support. Any advice?

 

- J.T.