Ok so i dont have linux but this site seems really helpful. I was just wondering how i would get my hardrive to work. i set one to master and one to slave. i want to be able to use both of them but i dont know how. the master is a windows XP and the slave is a windows 2000. any help is appreciated! thanks!

hi,
first you install Windows 2000 and then win XP. It will automatically detect it and at the time of booting will prompt for the menu.

regards

You will need at least place for one linux partition and a swap partition to run linux. Whether they are on the "master" or "slave" or mixed, it doesn't matter. You should plan probably about 10 GB (if you can spend them) of free space, more doesn't hurt. To be able to access the Linux partition you will have to install a boot loader either in the Master Boot Record (MBR) on the master disk or on a floppy drive. The installation of this is usually done during the setup of any of the major Linux distros.
You should at least divide the root folder (/) from the home folder (/home) so that if you reinstall not all your personal settings are gone. So that would make up for at least three partitions, but I'm sure you will get more recommendations :

/ 6 GB to hold the basic Linux files
/home 3,5 GB to hold your personal settings
swap 0,5 GB to act as temporary swap space if an application needs more RAM

... that would sum up to about 10 GB. Search for "partitioning scheme" or so to get other ways of splitting partitions, like creating an extra /boot, /tmp or /var partitions. But you won't need them necessarily.

Thanks, so that means i'm going to have to buy the windows 2000 cd as well as windows XP cd correct?

you can definitely save money by downloading linux for free from this site. Its one of the feature of Linux......i.e its free of cost.

regards

You might wanna try by way of editing boot.ini file in WinXP. In c:\boot.ini you'll notice a line that starts with multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect /NoExecute=OptIn
You can try adding another line similar to the one above for Win2000. Replace rdisk(0)partition(1) by the IDE number and partition number respectively of your Win2000 disk which if I'm not wrong should be rdisk(1)partition(1) for your case.

Otherwise, you can change the jumpers on both the disks to "Cable Select" and later change the disk order thru' BIOS to which ever you'd like to boot into.

Having to go through the BIOS isn't really necessary, you'd do fine with a boot loader, when I was in college, we had to have xp, 2000, 2003 and linux on the same box. So we'd install all the MS os's first, then we'd install linux, it's boot loader would take charge of all the other os's. The only time I bothered to go through the BIOS to pick which disk to boot was at home, when I decided to install Solaris 10 on another hdd, using the BIOS was easier than working with boot loaders as far as solaris is concerned.

thanks for all the help!