Using my new hard drive

[flamingspinach]

I just found an old 30GB HDD lying around, which I hooked up as IDE0 slave. It has a bunch of data on it which I don't want to delete and don't really have anywhere to transfer to. I also want to install Linux on this HDD, perhaps a disk install of Knoppix, or Debian. I'd go for Gentoo but since this is my primary workstation I don't want to have a downtime of several days while I set it up (I hear I need to compile everything from source).

In any case, is it possible to install linux on a non-empty Ext2 partition? If so, is there a way that I can convert the entire 30GB HDD, which is currently NTFS, into Ext2? If really hard-pressed I could probably shrink my data down to less than 15GB, and then just do a "Towers of Hanoi" type thing, but I'd prefer not to if possible.

Also, Ext2 is not readable by WinXP, and I know linux can read FAT32, so is it maybe best to go with that? I don't know how a UNIX file structure would be possible under FAT32 though, and so I'm not sure whether I'd be able to install linux on that...

So in short I need some way to use my 30GB HDD so that I can keep the 20 GB of data I have, install linux on it, and somehow get both WinXP and linux to be able to read and write the data.

Any suggestions?

 

[Doh!]

There are utilities to read ext2 from winxp, and ntfs from linux.

 

[TGS]

If you go with Gentoo, you can download the binaries as well as doing a stage 3 load. As long as the ebuilds are available for pre-compiled packages you really don't need to compile much of anything.

Portage and the apps compiled for your architecture, sounds good to me.