I belong to a local computer stuff swap on facebook. I may be able to get a hard drive for a good cheap price AND my question is this. Once i have downloaded all personal stuff, ie web favorites, photos, docs, fave fonts, other personal stuff onto usb flash drive...install new hard drive then put usb flash drive into usb port and download, install MINT then onto the hard drive and not have it partioned, but fully linux mint? I saw that someone had a 160gb, or a 250gb hard drive and some ram sticks too that would work for my DELL C521 desktop pc. That way I have a better fully linux loaded pc. ALSO....would I be able to have the current 80gb hard drive in its thin smaller case with the new hard drive? I mean two is better than one? not sure if it is possible, will google it and see..any ideas most welcome.

'A LIL KNOWLEDGE IN THE HANDS OF A FOOL, (ME i GUESS) IS A VERY DANGEROUS THING'

Why not just clone the drive with clonezilla?

A somewhat more complex, but, in my opinion, better and less likely to leave you with a bonkered system approach:

Change your system BIOS to boot from the USB drive before booting from the hard drive. Install Clonzilla on a USB drive, boot it, and clone your current system to a (large enough - use the df command to see how much space you current system is actually using) different USB drive. Then verify the clone by booting from it. If that works correctly, you have a good, working, system on the USB drive.

At that point, pull your old drive, install the new one, boot again from the Clonzilla USB drive, and clone the working system to the new hard drive.

Notes:

1. The above assumes that you have at least two USB ports available.
2. If your system can handle more than one drive (most desktop systems can handle four "out of the box"), just install the second drive and use them both together.

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I don't get the question. "not have it partioned, but fully linux mint?"

I agree that two drives are better usually. Btrfs and zfs and lvm might allow one to add drives to the total space in a slightly different way than a normal mount would.

my pc has 4 usb ports, one mouse, one keyboard, 2 in front. I have one of them set up to use an external cd/dvd burner, but it is screwed up..maybe fix it??? cannot say??? wont allow remove/ open close of sliding tray...trashed I guess?? but for the $30 to replace? why not replace? any how....want to totally give pc to linux, no windows anymore, at least that is what I think now,,,,if I had TWO HARD DRIVES...maybe one could be windows, the other one some version of linux......it is only 1.87 ghz 70gb hard drive, 1.5 gb ram so far, but I want to update the ram soon enough...maybe by st patricks day?;;;;;
as far as other stuff, not sure at present. just want to make pc faster and windows part is so slow it isnt funny. linux side is by my estimate, maybe 3 to 4 times faster..........
now, I want to slow the restaurant. any ideas helpful, i want to learn all this stuff, but truthfully it is like you patient kind folks are trying to teach a monkey how to use a laptop,,,,,

OK, that sounds like you have a (very old) desktop system. Can you tell us the specific brand and model of your system? (Without those details it's somewhat like asking someone "How can I restring my guitar?" without even telling them what type of guitar you have.)

The brand/model information is, usually, on the back of the system box.

Likewise, you CD/DVD problem might be easier to solve if you told us the brand and model information of it.

By the way, my daughter had a laptop system running a M$ operating system that was running so slow that she wanted to trash it and have her husband buy a new one for her. I looked at it and discovered that she was running an OS that had never been updated, and a hard drive that was more than 90% full - mostly with photos of the grandchildren - and that was badly fragmented. I offloaded the photos (except a couple Gb she wanted active) to a backup USB, defragmented the drive (a two day long process) and updated her system to the most recent available, and defragmented again (only an hour or so that time). After that her laptop ran "like new."

Hi fellow guitarist, I have an older DELL C521 PC,,,1.87ghz, 1.5gb ram, 80gb hard drive with 2 usb posts front, 2 usb ports in rear of this pc of CRAP DELL PC.
yes, it is an older pc of crap...no doubt about it...who ever thought of making it, placing it in such a small thin case should be shot with rusty, low powered 410 shotguns in the nether regions.I never ever have liked this pc, wife bought it, and I have had to deal with its crappy internet speed and crappy ability to fly my beloved flying ww2 war games, namely IL2 sturmovik, and Janes WW!! fighters, and microsofts so so flying combat sim. not to mention my Abes ODDWORLD ONE AND TWO....that being said....I gotta make do with this until who knows when? I am on soc sec disability pay and may never have money to upgrade or buy another...but I wont bore you good people with my troubles. Right now in this present day and time, I would settle for expanding the current partITion to 50/50 or bigger for Mint/winxp, and to learn how to install a newer/used hard drive and add my crap and or load my crap onto a new hard drive and install mint 13 cinnamon MAYA version as sole operating system...thanks everyone!

BY THE WAY, i PLAY A STRATOCASTER, GREG BENNET RL2, LES PAUL CLONE...SOUNDS GREAT! STAGG L400, TELECASTER, AND MY BELOVED oSCAR SCHMIDT OE40 NATURAL JAZZ BOX....PLAY LOTS OF STUFF, HAVE A GRATEFUL DAY...

My current cd /dvd burner has shot craps....dead...gonna buy new one.

According to a quick Google, the Dell Dimension C521 has a dual core 64 bit AMD processor. It also is supposed to have a 160Gb drive. How did you determine that you only had an 80Gb drive? (Since that's half of 160 Gb, I suspect that someone "helpfully" split your 160 Gb drive into two parts. Does your XP side show a D:/ drive in addition to a C:/ drive?)

Re your CD drive: Consider your local Salvation Army thrift store - they often have that stuff in the $5 or less range. New might not work in your system since most new drives and CDs use SATA connections. (If your optical drive has a 1.5" flat cable connection, its not SATA - those cables a small, snap-in types.)

The bad news is that the C521 has only one internal drive bay, so the two drive solution is harder. (You could, theoretically, use one of the two external drive bays for a second hard drive, but - if my speculation in the first paragraph is correct - you may have more internal drive space than you thought you had.)

Oh, that write-up I found also says that you have four rear USB ports, not just two, and the two in front. So it may be for a newer version of the C521.

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If you have a 4GB USB stick, go to SystemRescueCD and follow the instructions to create a bootable USB of the System Rescue system. When you boot that system, you should get lots of information about your hardware. If you boot into the GUI, you can use the gparted command to see exactly what's in you hard drive.

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P.S.: My choice of analogy mislead you. I actually play nothing but CDs. (My older son in an electric guitarist in a local, non-professional, band, but I much prefer classical (18th century) acoustic.)

actually you are speaking of its NEWER FORM....we bought this pc probably 6 yrs or so back. 80 gb hard drives were not the norm at the time, 60 was pretty big back then. it may have been longer than the 6 yrs. But yes, it has a 80 gb hard drive, 1.87ghz, and 1.5gb ram...it came with a 512mb ram, i upgraded it myself. it is pretty much on its last yr or so of service, bad floppy drive, wont open, cd drive is shot, wont work, external cd/dvd burner, is worthless as well, has 2 usb ports in front, 2 in the rear of pc. thin case. why oh why such a thin case? I eventually will purchase a nice HUGE tower locally at a pc shop, and buy the motherboard, and all the other stuff and put together a frankenstien unit...usb ports a plenty, nice dvd/cd burner reader unit, big internal hard drive, maybe a 500gb or 1 tb unit...and hopefully 8gb ram. I figure that will run me about $400 or so. with all the fans, and other stuff i might have the amt close, dont know...but for now what I have posted on the DELL C521 is indeed correct, I have even googled it as well as looked at the windows eval of what the computer is. hope this helps.
When i installed it, for some reason I gave win xp about 51 gb, and the rest to Mint 13 cinnamon MAYA. and I should have partioned it better but being such a cherry did not do so...my bad. I still have about 26gb left over on win xp side, would love to grab another 15gb for maya mint 13 cinnamon, would make it better split.

install your new drive make sure you can mount it /mnt/drive-new (sdbX) now open a terminal assume sudo or root what ever you all do and cd to /
we want all are stuff moved to the new drive because we have no clue if you have enouf space on hard drive-old

Now go make coffee have a bite to eat. Now you have a copy of your system all tarred up. minus the sys,mnt,tmp,proc
but we are still minus the sys,mnt,tmp,proc
we need to get our fstab to work with grub.
we will take that blkid and edit the /drive-new/etc/fstab file and here is one of mine
if you added a new swap on the new drive then we need that. Up to you.
ok now everything is like the old with the new drive. lets tell grub. grub-update.
reboot and test it. The reason I do not compress /tmp is because of I had problems stale pid link to temp or other stuff.
also on slower machines or if your in a hurry use tar cvpz /mnt/drive-new/Copy_of_drive-old.tar.gz and make tar.gz it will be faster but uses more space

Drakeo's suggestions, above, seem to ignore your lack of a second drive bay but are otherwise reasonable.

To address your future "home build" plan, I've gone down that road a few times and found it usually more expensive than an "off the shelf" solution.

For example, my current main system started out as a HP tower (Quad core AMD, Windows 7, 4GB memory, 1TB SATA drive) for $350 from Staples in 2010. (No display, but I had a couple from older systems.) I then added 8GB more memory ($70.) and a couple of 2.5TB drives at about $100 each. The unmodified base system is now available for ~$300 or less, and, by itself, is a fairly good system for most purposes. (Most people - even me - have a limited need for a multiple monitor system running several different operating system version at the same time. I sometimes like to try out such things for fun, but don't have any real need to do so.) Note that the system described is not a "gaming" system, since I still use the built-in display system, and the AMD processor is not all that fast. But I don't use computers for playing games - except for learning new programming languages and similar low system demand things.

I've only found that to be true for the cheapest-of-the-cheap, bottom of the barrel machines. As soon as you get a decent proc, RAM, and hard drive setup in there, it's usually MUCH cheaper to build it yourself, not to mention that you usually get better quality components.

Most desktops/workstations that I build cost right around $1-1.2k. The last one that I built would have been more than double that from HP, Dell, etc. I recently spec'd out a higher end machine for about $3.5k, the nearest Dell was $9.5k and HP was approaching $12k. The next machine I'm building for my job will cost around $17k, the nearest Dell/HP is over $50k.

For el-cheapo systems, you're right, since it's hard to even find a decent chassis and power supply for the price some retailers are charging for full machines. Of course, they're using the cheapest components imaginable and there's a decent chance it'll fail within just a few years.

All quite true, but we retired people with only limited income and very low usage needs can "make do" quite well with an "el cheapo" system. And, given our low, non commercial, usage, the failure rate is reasonably acceptable. (The HP 6710f I referenced above has had no component failures since I purchased it several years ago. Despite loading the power supply with two additional drives - although those were both WD "Green" drives, slow but not too power hungry.)

One reason for the multiple drives in my system is so I can mirror the personal data files I keep on it. And I do keep a UPS between the system and the mains so power fluctuations will (hopefully) not impact the (relatively) fragile cheap hardware.