Hi, I have used windows for a few years and although i've heard of Linux I have never had much to do with it or thought much about it really until now. I have an 80GB hard drive which I am going to partition to put my games and MP3's on seperatley, leaving XP on the other part of the disk. I have an old hard disk which currently has Win 98 on. Can't remember the exact capacity between 3-5Gb anyway. I was thinking about partitioning this disk so that I could put linux on it, and putting it as a slave in my PC. Here's where you lot come in! Firstly is everything i've said above do-able and make sense, any better ways of doing it? Reasons why I should'nt do it etc? Secondly, although really I am not too bothered about keeping 98 should I keep it anyway? Is there a way of setting up my system to let me choose from 3 OS systems (XP, 98, Linux)? And if so does it matter that 2 of them are on a slave drive, would I still get to choose the OS system at the start? Is like 2 or 3GB enough to install Linux? Sure there was something else I want to ask but have forgotten. Any ideas, suggestions, opinions are more than welcome and thanks for any replies in advance! Paul

It all looks do-able to me. If it makes sense to keep a windows version installed on your computer, opinions may vary. Most important things to keep in mind: - keep backups of important data - 3 GB harddisk space is sufficient for Linux, although some more won't do any harm - The booting you want is possible, but keep in mind that experimenting with a bootloader can result in a system not wanting to start up from the harddisk. So it's wise to have startup floppy's. - If windows '98 still has the command FDISK somewhere, it won't do any harm to create a dos startupdisk with that command on it. Just for safety. - Personally I do have a tiny bootable linux distribution on CD. (Which I've never needed to use on my own computer). - Suse is a very good distribution for people switching over from XP. I believe version 9, which will be released shortly also includes installation tools for resizing NTFS (Win XP) partitions. So if you consider buying Partition Magic, you can save that money. And from Suse proffessional editions are always more fun than the personal editions.

Some tips: 1) If you want to be able to access you windoze partitons under linux...stick with FAT instead of NTFS, it makes things easier/safer. Linux can read NTFS alright but writing to it can cause data loss. Linux FAT support is good. 2) If you want to triple boot, install 98, then XP and then linux. 3) Mandrake (unsure about suse) can resize NTFS partitions during setup. 4) 3-5Gb is fine, just create two partitions (during the linux setup), one for swap (~256Mb) and the rest for root aka "/". NB if you are installing something like suse which comes on about 7 CDs these days 3-5Gb may NOT be enough for a complete install. 5) You may wish to wait till Mandrake 9.2 comes out (in a week or so). Usually most ".2" versions of distros are pretty good. ".0" can sometimes be experiamental/ flakey....getting there with ".1" and by ".2" things should be looking good!=o)

Thanks. Just one thing which is bugging me. Although i intended to partition my current disk, with XP on it, simply to put my games, documents etc seperatley. You said to triple boot all thre I would first need to install 98, xp then linux. Well the way I was thinking about it, is that I wanted to really leave XP alone as much as possible. Can I not just add the seond hard disk I have as a slave, then manipulate it on its own i.e. partition it and install Linux without touching my original disk. Is this possible?, would this cause problems? I would'nt say i'm a novice but this kind of thing, including aprtitioning is all new to me! Thanks Paul

It's perfectly possible to install Linux on the second harddisk without touching the original one. I'm not sure the booting proces where you want to choose the 3 OS can be achieved with what you want. If you really want your Linux as safe as possible, so it won't be touched by XP then you'll have to boot Linux from floppy. There is a lot of information on the internet about partitioning, but I wouldn't worry to much about it if I where you. To start with, just put the harddisk in your computer and install a linux distribution. Select during installation it has to be installed on your second harddisk and select you want to boot from a good old floppy disk. For safety it won't do any harm to have a second boot floppy somewhere... Make sure your computer is configured to check if there is a boot floppy in the diskdrive during startup (has to be configered in your system bios). The "floppy boot" solution is not as nice as choosing during startup, but putting a floppy in when you want to boot from linux and take out the floppy when you need XP is not much work either. 3Dave is right that ".0" versions of linux distribution sometimes are a little experimental. But, that also means that there are new feautures added. Most things will settle out after the first update. The reason I recommend Suse Pro for starters, is because they have a very good Set up tool for configuring and maintaining the system and almost everything you might ever wish to install or try out is already somewhere stored on CD/DVD. My main computer currently boots Red Hat 9 by default, I know Mandrake is very good. I just think Suse is the best, but it's a personal opinion. 3Dave is right that you harddisk might be too small for installing everything that will come with above mentioned distro, but for trying out you don't need everything on the harddisk at once. I once did get a few annoyances when my harddisk partition (XFS) was much more than 95% full. But then XFS was experimental and I guess every filesystem gets rather slow when it has almost no free space anymore. A windows users buys every few years a new version of windows. Linux can be obtained free of charge, in my personal opinion every Linux user should buy a distro at least once in his entire life. Suse Pro costs about $90, it's much better than XP pro for at least half the price and you don't want to know the price of all the applications you will receive with Suse when you have to buy them in a windows equivalent. I never needed it, but when buying a distro from a good vendor, you will receive installation support when requested. I would not be surprised if next year you want XP on the small harddisk and Linux on the large one. Mainly depends on how fond you are of playing windows games. Don't think to much about partitioning. It's very good to have your documents, photo's and music stored on a different partition then your operating system. Just start with what you want to do and see what happens.

Thankyou for all the good advice posted in this thread, I'll just do one thing at a time, and hopefully everything should run smoothly!!. Cheers again Paul

Yep, I agree with Guido about buying a distro every now and again. Suse comes with good documentation and I still refer back to the manual I received with v5 every now and again, most of it is still relavent today. The problem you have with installing 98 anything but first is that it wipes your existing MBR (Master Boot Record) and replaces it with its own which doesn't allow for multi-booting. NT/2000/XP all give you a boot menu allowing you to boot a previous version of windows or the newer one. Installing linux after that gives you another menu, you may have heard of lilo or grub. You could always give a boot manager like Boot Magic a go which allows you to "hide" different hard drives and boot records each time you boot. The floopy disk way of booting linux as mentioned above is another way.....although you will still have trouble trying to install 98 after XP, you may want to post that up on the XP forum for an answer. Oh, and make sure you have a backup copy of the floppy disk!