ok I have alot of old PC's sitting around that are getting Frankenstiened. I have copies of Ubuntu 5.10 and am comfortable with that, its the intended OS.

So right now i have a Gateway with a 600mhz Pentium 3 (its the one that schools got a few years back) and i have a Compaq Presario 5724 that has a Pentium Celeron ???mhz. The problem i am facing is this.

I have Ubuntu loaded onto the Hard Drive that is connected to the old compaq board and processor. I dont want to use that processor but i want the HD to use in addition to the one in the Gateway. Currently this has Windows 98 on it. So when i fire up the new machine i will have two different drives with two different OS's connected.

will they both try to boot individually and if so what should i do?

If you slave the win98 harddrive, and leave nothing in the menu.lst for the Ubuntu's grub install You should be fine. Grub will 'take precedence' over win98's bootloader (as grub is installed on the MBR of the master drive) allowing you to clear or otherwise use the win98 harddrive.

...just make sure that the second drive is in the slave position (may require moving a jumper or two).

You should be able to choose which drive boots from your bios. When you get it setup to burn cd/dvd make certain that the cd/dvd drive is on a different ide cable from the burn data hard drive. Going from data on master1 to dvd on master2 will be much faster than going from data on master1 to dvd on slave1.

Have you looked at K3b? Best linux burner I have seen.

lazlow

figured out how to set a HD to slave, i have to wait for the new motherboard to come in the mail with the new RAM.

2.6ghz with 1GB ram YEAH! for $200