Hi

I have a laptop with 30 GB HDD with most of it occupied by Windows XP

Now that I want to try my hand out at Linux I was wondering what would be the best way to install it ?

I feel 30 GB is way too less for dual boot and I ll be crunched for HD space

Is external HDD a viable option ? or another Internal HDD with ? 60GB?

I would really like to install lotsa software on Linux & experiment it out..

And cost wise which is a good optino - an internal HDD or an external HDD (of say ~80GB)

Let me know

Thanks
LiNGuy

30 GB is too little for dual boot. I have around 40GB for each distro. To try out and install much software you need at least 20GB.

My wife had the same problem. She went with an external HD. BUT, there were problems. First: make sure you have the necessary external port to plug into if you get an external disk. She didn't and had to buy additional cable with hub to plug into her laptop. Second: XP wouldn't or couldn't recognize it, nor format it to be able to recognize it. I had to use my SuSE with QTparted to format if for her, then she was able to use it for a while. Then XP did its thing, as all microsucks seems to do, and after a day or two, suddenly refused to recognize the external as formated, or having mp3's on it. Hours of coping mp3's wasted.

The disk she chose? A 300 Gig Maxtor. She finally bought Partition Magic 8 (should be here next week) to try that to see if it makes a difference.

So. I'd say, go with an internal drive, or something other than Maxtor external. Save yourself some headaches.

Apologies to the good folks at Maxtor. I understand that it's a good drive most of the time. It just wasn't in this instance.

I've never used more than 7 GB on a Linux installation, and that's trying out a fair amount of software (not everything out there, but I never worry about running out of room). 30 GB is plenty for the OSes and their programs.

I installed on a friend's computer a dual-boot of Mepis and XP--8 GB for XP, 7 GB for Mepis, and the remaining 5 GB for a FAT32 partition to share files between the two OSes. That's 20 GB total.

Now... where your files go, that's a different story.

Yeah, anything above ~3 GB should be fine for installing Linux w/programs.

BTW, about those Maxtor drives, I have some friends who used fairly new Maxtor internal hard drives in their machines, and had them completely fail a few times for no apparent reason. So maybe their reliablity isn't the best...