Harddrive Installation

[Xenon14]

Every time I put together a computer, i spend 90% of my time getting the harddrive to work. I just put together a moderately new system... 2500+, nforce2, 512ram, 80 gig Western Digital 8mb cache. I ran Knoppix v3.1 to see if the comp works fine, and it does. Now my question is this, what procedure should I follow to install my harddrive? (I'm thinking of partioning it into 2 drives so i can choose what to boot, Windows XP or Linux. thanks. (BTW, I don't have a floppy drive installed, just a cdrw and a dvd drive. So if u're going to be recommending any boot discs, keep in mind I can only burn on cdrw. Thanks.

 

[Chaotic42]

Just get an IDE cable, plug the "alone end" into the IDE Primary controller on the board. Take the hard drive, set the jumper to Master or single and plug the other end of the IDE cable into it. Then connect the 4-pin molex power connector into the drive. Make sure the red stripe on the IDE cable is facing the power plug.

Install Windows XP first. Just make it's main parition however big you want it. Once it's installed, install Linux. It will need a / partition and a swap partition atleast. I have my /home on a seperate partition, but you don't have to.

You'll then need to install a bootloader to be able to select which OS you want.

Note that if you make the Windows installation NTFS, Linux won't be able to write to it (reliably at least).