A linux harddrive

[Pyraine]

Ok, I have 2 harddrives in my pc right now, one has Windows installed on it, the other doesn't have any operating system installed on it, it just stores files as it's my biggest harddrive, I also have another harddrive packed away with Linux installed on it (the exact distro is Ubuntu). My plan is to put the Linux HDD in, but I dont know if there is space for it, how can i find out without opening my tower drive?

Another question is, how would I set it up? would i just stick it in a slot and it will be fine?

My last question is, once the harddrive is in, is it possible (and if so how) to set up a menu on the boot screen so i can choose which harddrive to boot from, the windows or the linux.

 

[urbanfox]

Most motherboards have 2 IDE channels with 2 drives possible on each drive. I assume you have the 2 HDD's on the master channel, and one cdrw on the secondary channel? You should have room for one more, unless you have four drives already, then you will need a cheap IDE PCI card.

http://www.handyarchive.com/Utilities/System-Tools/6601-OSL2000-Boot-Manager.html

 

[Pyraine]

sheet i have 2 cd drives and 2 harddrives what a bugger, i guess i will just have to partition my 160GB harddrive..would it be possible to dual boot?

 

[urbanfox]

sheet i have 2 cd drives and 2 harddrives what a bugger, i guess i will just have to partition my 160GB harddrive..would it be possible to dual boot?

yeah.

 

[Dataforce]

If you are using Windows Xp, your drives may be NTFS. Currently NTFS support in linux is experimental at best, and its not reccomended to use linux to write to an NTFS drive.

 

[urbanfox]

If you are using Windows Xp, your drives may be NTFS. Currently NTFS support in linux is experimental at best, and its not reccomended to use linux to write to an NTFS drive.

I think he was just going to dual boot, and welcome back DF, havn't seen you in a while!

 

[Dataforce]

Thanks UF, I browse often, just only post occasionally, I aint really doing much mir related atm.

I think he was planning on writing to the hdds aswell, but i may be wrong, just pointing out that the version of NTFS used on XP can be corrupted easily if written wrongly, thus its not reccomended to try it on a drive with stuff you wanna keep. If you want to use your big drive in linux and windows, it would need to be FAT32, which is highly inferior (ihmo) to NTFS (Which is one of Microsofts better things).