Hard Drive 4 Linux

[Nexus]

Hi ive lately been experimenting with linux and would like to purchase a new hard drive in order to dual boot it (i dont want to partition). i was wondering if anyone could tell me what kind of size id want for trying a few different linux distros and what sort of price im looking at.

if you can could you tell me where i can get hard drives really cheap in the uk.

thanks

Nexus

 

[agent86]

By and large, most linux distros will fit on any size hard drive that you can buy new these days. If you're just experimenting, plan on say 10-30GB per distro you want to have installed at the same time. That's a pretty high number, but it will leave you a lot of extra room to install optional packages and have some file storage space to work with.

I live in the US, so I don't know what the best place is to get computer parts in the UK is. I would shop around, and look for sales. Most of the major brands are fine, there are always a few bad eggs though, so check for warranty information. Most hard drives sold at least in the US are sold as if a gigabyte was 1,000,000,000 bytes, which tends to confuse people. Computers treat a gigabyte as 1024*1024*1024 = 1073741824 bytes. Just keep in mind that the number on the box is going to be bigger than the size of the drive once you've installed it.

Dual booting operating systems is all fine and good, but keep in mind what a pain it is to reboot every time you want to do something in the other OS - for many people, I'd think a better solution would be to wait until you're going to upgrade your PC, and use the old one for Linux. Get a switchbox or something so that all you have to do is press a button to move between the systems. That's a bit more advanced though, so come back and ask that question when you get there

 

[subtle_turtle]

See above, but also, keep in mind that the boot sectors for all the various OS's you put on your computer must be on the same primary HD, so you will have to partition at least some. You can spread the files systems across as many HD's as you'd like, but short of going into the BIOS on every boot and changing the primary HD (if you have SATA, this isn't possible at all with IDEEE), you can't really have the OSs' on multiple drives.

 

[gamblor]

You might also want to download VMware server (you can get it for free from www.vmware.com as long as you sign up for a serial key). Then you can just fiddle around with Linux without needing to partition or install new drives.

Another option would be to try Live CDs. This means everything will run in memory and from the CD...no need to install anything. Just put the CD into your drive and reboot. Ubuntu's default CD is a live CD, Fedora 9 has one, then there's Knoppix, and so on.

As far as the hard drive goes, I agree you can get away with about 10-30GB if you just want to play with things. I believe the default Ubuntu install only requires about 2GB so 5GB would probably be plenty. Then there are distros like Damn Small Linux which require even less.

See above, but also, keep in mind that the boot sectors for all the various OS's you put on your computer must be on the same primary HD, so you will have to partition at least some

That's not entirely true. The Master Boot Record (MBR) will reside on the first disk, but the boot records for all of the other distros will be on their respective partitions. This is why you need to setup grub you point to the correct place when you add new entries to it. For example, my Windows is on my sda drive. Then on my sdb drive, sdb1 is Fedora, sdb2 is swap, sdb3 is Ubuntu, and sdb4 I haven't used yet. So my boot information (the actual kernel and the initrd) for Fedora is on sdb1 and the boot information for Ubuntu is on sdb3. The grub bootloader is installed in my MBR on sda1. I used to use the NT loader as my boot loader years ago, and when I did that, I had to copy my boot sectors from the Linux drives to my C: drive in Windows, but that's not necessary any more.

You can always reinstall grub or Windows into the MBR. With a Windows disk you can pop it in, run the installer in "repair" mode then type "fixmbr" at the command prompt. You can reinstall grub as follows:

Put in the live CD and open a terminal. Then run these commands:

1. grub
2. find /boot/grub/stage1

This should return something like (hd0,0). You will need this output for the next step.

3. root (hd0,0) [swap out (hd0,0) with whatever was returned in step 2]
4. setup (hd0)

This will now install grub in your MBR. Yippee!

You can spread the files systems across as many HD's as you'd like, but short of going into the BIOS on every boot and changing the primary HD (if you have SATA, this isn't possible at all with IDEEE), you can't really have the OSs' on multiple drives.

If you are willing to setup logical partitioning it is possible to have several different drives acting as if they are a single filesystem. Once the first drive fills up, the OS will start writing files to the second drive. That obviously requires some setup though.


I have been a Linux user for about 7 years now, but I actually really like Ubuntu. I would recommend you at least try it out. If you do install Ubuntu, it will actually setup the menu.lst file for you (grub's config file) so that your system dual boots both Windows and Ubuntu. Be careful installing multiple distros though. By default, they usually all try to write their stuff to the MBR.