Installing a PC with XP and Linux
 

Hello

I have a PC that has 2 internal disks (40Gb and 60Gb) and an external 160Gb USB2 disk.

I want to reinstall it from scratch and put XP on the 40Gb disk and Redhat Linux on the 60Gb disk (with a load of other stuff).

My plan is:

Disk 1 - 40Gb - XP Pro
Disk 2 - 60Gb - Partition 1 (20Gb) - RH Linux, Partition 2 (40Gb) - other guff
Disk 3 - 160Gb - Software, Music and other guff

Is this the best way to do this ? I want the 40Gb partition on disk 2 for other guff, but I also want to hide partiton 1 of disk 2 from XP Pro, and hide disk 1 from RH Linux.

Also, whats the best boot loader to use so I can select between XP and RH Linux ?

Dave

I bought two of those drive caddies and simply swap over the two hard drives when I want to change OS.

I know that doesn't answer your question but its idiot proof and so works well for me. ;)

Cheers

I've got a PC here with one disk, 3 partitions.

First is the Win 2000 Server partition
Second is Fedora Core 2.0
Third is a 'data' partition for apps and other things.

When in 2000, it cannot see the linux partition, which is a pro and a con (sometimes do want to move stuff between the two).

When in Fedora, it cannot see the NTFS partition, again, a pro and a con.

As for boot loader, I'm using the one built into Fedora, which I think is GRUB (something like that), I would guess any distro of linux would use something siimlar.

The advice I have is to install XP first, then linux.

Always install Windows first. Then, when you install Linux it will set up the GRUB loader so you can boot into one or other OS

We just run one pc with vmware for all the different operating systems that we need :o

As said, install Windows first on the primary partition on the master drive of the first IDE controller. Then install Linux.

Bear in mind Windows cannot read Linux partitions and Linux cannot read NTFS partitions (not out of the box anyway) so you'll have to create a small FAT32 partition somewhere if you want to exchange data between the environments.

Thought about trying VirtualPC or VMware?

Funny you mention that but I have a copy of VMWare from work that I was thinking about. Will look into it...

Dave

VMware is the bollox :D