I am a student in the local Tech school and I am taking Linux classes. I would like to install a second hard drive on my PC so I can have XP and Linux on the same hard drive. I am doing this because I want to be able to practice and understand Linux. Thanks.

Sounds great, but do you have a question?

If you already have windows on the first drive, then by adding a second drive you have linux on that one, but if you have something else on the first then by all means its easy to put win and linux on the second as well...

you can also take 10-20gb of the existing drive and use that...
using an application called gparted which you should be able to use from a live boot disc...
most late distro's of linux are live boot and contain gparted...
Try ubuntu or sabayon, or even Fedora has a live boot disc...


once you have a live boot disc, then you can boot that and try linux out to ensure that your pc chip set is easily recognised, from there its all go...

Yes I do have a question. On the 2nd drive, would I install XP first, then Linux on another partition after? Or just partition the disk and install the os's afterwards? Thanks.

install win first then linux, as linux will install a boot loader to the mbr of hda and if windows is loaded second then it will over write the mbr and you would have to manually write the boot record for win, in grub...
Plus win likes to be first on a drive(not always if you can fool it tho)..