I was kinda wondering if I could install Linux on the same hard drive as I have XP installed??

If so, how do I do this? I know absolutely NOTHING about "Partitioning" or whatever else it may require.

-thanks

Depending on which distro you install makes it easy of difficult. Red hat and Suse are probably the easiest and they will as long as you're careful partiton the disc and give you a boot loader screen but I'm no expert either and it's easy to bugger up the windows partition.

My advice would be to dig out that old 15Gig drive that's hanging about, put it in as a slave drive and install on to that.

fully agree with horai on that last part -- install it on a separate HDD -- this way no messing with partitions!!

Now how in the world did you know I had an old 15Gig'er sitting around?

I was debating that ... guess that's the route I'll go.

The disk my buddy gave me is called: Simply Mepis -- sound familiar?

I can boot from the disc and sign in under Username: root / Password: root
and have full access to the OS. I can also sign in under "demo" and it will show me what
all it will do. It's pretty cool, and I LOVE the interface.

-thanks yall-

ROFL

Didn't you know we all have an old 15gig drive hanging about.

Simply mepis is a flavour I've not heard of before but the interface is likely to be Gnome or KDE x windws system. Most distro's use either one of those.
You can download most distros as long as you're patient and I would still definitely advise Suse 9.2 or the latest Fedora.

we all have one lying around lol


windows xp will do that automatically when you install it from disk to a drive with any other os on it

Yes...be VERY careful if you want to install it on a drive with your main OS already on it. I did that on a laptop with RedHat 8 and lost my XP partition (didn't lose anything important luckily).

Horai is right...it's likely gnome or kde. Do a google search and you can see screenshots of both to get an idea of what they look like. Bear in mind....OS skinning was built into Linux from the start, so screenshots are like screenshots of different visual styles essentially.

If you have an extra drive, set it up as a slave and then install.
The problem will be the boot loader. What I had to do last time I had dual boot setup, was let Linux (in this case Lindows) take over the boot loader bits and then add my XP partition to the boot loader manually. I don't think Windows can have an entry in boot.ini pointing to a Linux partition, but I could be wrong (and most likely am so reasearch if you are more interested in this). Fedora/RedHat gives you the option of which boot loader to use, I just used the recommended option. Afterwards, edited it and added an entry for "WindowsXP" and just pointed it to the first disk (disk 0) first partition (partition 1). If you install Linux to a secondary disk, it should be disk 1, partition 1. If you install it to a secondary partition on your main hard drive it would be disk 0, partition 2. You get the idea.

Let us know how it goes!

Wow, lots of stuff to consider.

I think it's KDE -- I've seen it before, and I believe that's what it was when I booted from the disc. I noticed there was an icon labeled: "Install Me" -- so I guess I would click that to install ... but I'm definetly gonna do it on a slave drive.

Thanks yall .. I'll post a screenie when I get it done.

I'll be looking forward to it.

Ok b, I kinda understand what your saying ... but not really

I've installed Linux on my other hard drive .. now when I boot, it still automatically boots XP.

I have to go into the bios and choose the other hard drive as main boot device to get linux to boot.

I'm wanting to know how do I get it to ask me which hard drive do I want to boot ... meaning, I turn the computer on, it reads I have 2 hard drives, then ask me -- which to boot.

Is this possible, or do I have to do something else?

BTW: Linux is freaking cool!