installing linux

[korn4266]

I have to hard drives one with windowsxp professional on it and one with 3.99GB of stuff on it. I want to install linux on the second hard drive but I also want to keep the stuff that is one that drive. How can i do this? I also want to us windowsxp. How can I use both and switch between the two? After installing linux on the second hard drive with the 3.99GB of files on them can i still access the files with windows XP?

[wapcaplet]

You could use Partition Magic or a similar program to partition off a section of your second hard drive for Linux to use, but probably a safer thing to do would be copy your 3.99GB of stuff onto your first hard drive, and then wipe the second one clean and use some or all of it for Linux.

Just about every Linux distribution will give you the option to dual-boot with an already-existing Windows installation, so you will have no trouble there. Most of them will also automatically detect your Windows FAT32 hard drives, and mount them for you, but I don't know of any way to access a Linux ext2/3 partition from Windows, so anything you want to share should probably be formatted as FAT32.

[b00zer]

what I would do is allocate some free space on your second hard drive..I dont mean an empty partition but actual free unpartitioned space. I believe you can do this with XP thru its disk management utility. If not then partition magic can do it as well. And you can switch between the two using a variety of methods the easist probably being lilo or grub. And as far as accessing your stuff on the 2nd hard drive its possible for XP to read linux partitiions but its not supported natively so you'd have to find a program to help you with this.

[korn4266]

Thanks for the help. Would Red Hat 8.0 or Mandrake linux 9.0 be best for me? Will installing linux make anything easier to be messed up in windows?

[b00zer]

Either one is a great distro for newbies. It's all about preference. And you shouldnt have any problems against messing up your XP as long as you dont enable write support, if XP is on an NTFS partition.

[korn4266]

The windows XP is on FAT32. Will that cause a problem?

[b00zer]

by: korn4266
The windows XP is on FAT32. Will that cause a problem?

nope not at all, you can safely read and write to fat32 partitions.

[korn4266]

ok thanks for help a newbie I know I'm probly getting annoying. If it is ok i would like to add you to my buddy list.

[b00zer]

sure, no problemo

[korn4266]

ok thanks for everything.:)

[b00zer]

your welcome :p