Hi again all,

Through a bit of misfortune for a friends computer, I now find myself in possesion of a second hard disk...

currently, i am running winxp/redhat dual boot on an 80 gig drive. I want to add the second 40 gig drive to my existing system.

However, I was thinking about overall performance issues, etc...

could anyone suggest some configurations for using the new second hard disk i have acquired? since at the moment i have both xp and rh on one drive, would i perhaps be better off moving rh to the second hd completely, and leaving winxp on the other? perhaps i could also put the swap partitions for each of the os's on the other drive to help out? (i.e. rh9 on 2nd hd, with its swap on the 1st...)

any suggestions on what would be considered a good arrangement would be great!

also, i may be back with some other specific questions regarding the actual installation of the new drive (still quite new to linux, but l-o-v-i-n-g every minute of it so far...)

thanks for the help guys!

If both drives are on the same IDE bus, there would be no performance gain as they have to share that bus for data transfer IMHO. I have actually tried them on different IDE busses and splitting stuff up and I couldn't tell any gains judging by approx 1 gig file transfers.

I would just put it in, get the bios to recognise it, boot into linux and (assuming IDE1 slave, change for where you connect it) zero out the drive:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hdb

Now, all his illegal stuff and viruses are gone.

Then, slice it up into your wanted partitions, format, mount and off you go. Room!

# Partitioning
Linux Partition HOWTO
Rute - Partitions, File Systems, Formatting, Mounting

# Red Hat links
Red Hat Linux Manuals
Get your mp3 support here
Maximum RPM
rpmfind
Easier software management: apt4rpm - Red Carpet
Red Hat 8.0 Tips & Tricks

# Red Hhat 7.3 down configuration commands
setup leads to several configuration tools

# Red Hat 7.3 up configuration commands
Configure soundcard:
redhat-config-soundcard
Configure X server:
redhat-config-xfree86
Configure network:
redhat-config-network
Manage software:
redhat-config-packages

# Handling NTFS
New Technology FileSystem (NTFS) HOWTOs
Linux NTFS project

if you want my advice, try to put rh and xp on different drives (data security). putting each swap file on the other drive won't change anything, esp. if the drives are on the same IDE bus.