I've been designing my next computer for a dual boot system. I've read of installing a second hard drive just for Linux or partitioning the original HD. I have a few application that must run under an XP OS.

What are the general thoughts on this? Not afraid to spend a few bucks for the second drive.

steve

Well, if you know more or less what you're doing, installing both to one disk isn't any trickier than assigning one drive to each. I currently have no less than eight OSes (on four disks) and I haven't had any issues whatsoever. One member on this site, Saikee, even managed to install 100+ distributions to only two disks.

Still, if you can afford a second drive, why not get one anyway? Hard drives sometimes die and having a spare one - preferably with back-ups from the other one - can be a life-saver. Personally, I'd rather get two smaller ones than one big one.

I'll AOL jay73. If it was purely a case of 'no money' then you'd have to go for a single drive which, as jay73 says, isn't difficult - but otherwise, why not go for bigger better faster more?

Thanks for the fast replies. I just had an older laptop partitioned from W2000 to allow Mepis to be installed. I have a home PC that I'd like to add a drive to, one for Fedora and the original on XP.

My dream machine is a newer laptop, one drive for XP and the other for whatever Linux OS I go with. Can another HD even fit in a laptop?

steve

Laptops are usually too compact to house a second HD. As an alternative, you can use an external HD.

USB External hard-drives can sometimes be a pain to get a GNU/Linux distribution to run from, and it only works if the BIOS supports booting from a USB.

It's easier to partition the disk, IMO.