[Fwd: hello and perhaps some help]

Hi G-Dawg,

This would probably be a more appropriate post for ubuntu-users. I'm
moving it there, so when you reply, just reply to the ubuntu-users one.

> Now, about my problem - it occured to me today that I didn't want to get
> rid of XP (which is what I'm running on my desktop), but yet I didn't
> really want to share my desktop with Linux either, for fear there may be
> a horrible clash that would happen (and crashing XP twice in one year is
> an all time high for me; I'd rather not make it three) So I came up with
> the idea to 'sample' Linux on my old hard drive from my Packard Bell
> (yeah, I know) However, I have run into problems.

It's not such a crazy idea. Statistically, by dual-booting, you'll
improve the stability of your Windows system, simply because this will
mean that your Windows system will spend less time on the internet, and
because it will be used less, there's a smaller chance that it will be
infected by virusses and nasty scripts and trojans.

> So, frustrated, I stumbled onto ubuntu and saw that not only did it look
> ridiculously easy (again, I'm a newbie to Linux and I've heard Linux is
> not user-friendly like Windows), I decided to give it a go. I'm
> currently downloading the breezy beaver (and really, with a name like
> that why didn't I try this frist?) I wanted to try something different,
> but I have a feeilng I will be getting the same error message.

Breezy Badger :)

> As for the specs of my computer, I would like this placed on a second
> hard drive NOT the master (so basically the slave) The slave is a
> Fujitsu limited with 1.96GB; I am using an internal NIC which is Belkin
> 2003; NTFS; nVidia sound card with Hercules drivers....again, I want
> this to be on the second drive and theoretically, when I boot from the
> CD, shouldn't it do what Windows does and ask which drive I want it on?
> My computer is set to boot from the CD, but at least with Suse, it
> didn't even pick up that I had two hard drives.

Hercules drivers? That certainly takes me back to 1991! :)

When you say slave, do you mean slave on your primary controller? With
IDE drives, it works like this:

 - You normally have two IDE controllers on your motherboard, a Primary,
and a Secondary
 - On both these controllers you can put two drives, a master, and a slave
 - This means you can have a total of 4 drives on your motherboard
controllers

So you end up with these possibilities:

 - Primary Master
 - Primary Slave
 - Secondary Master
 - Secondary Slave

Just like Windows labels disk partitions as C:, D:, E:, etc, Linux also
labels its disks, exept it starts at "a". So the primary master will be
"hda" (hard disk a), Primary slave "hdb", Secondary master "hdc", and
Secondary slave "hdd". The partitions on this disk will then be devided
into numbers, starting with 1. So if your primary master has 3
partitions, it will have hda1, hda2 and hda3. In Linux, you can address
your partitions by refering to their name in the /dev directory. Let's
say you want to format the 3rd partition on your seconday master as swap
space, then you would: "sudo mkswap /dev/hdc3".

Many people have asked me how Windows' numbering relate to the Linux
one, in short, not too well, since it doesn't make too much sense. By
default, Windows makes the disk that you boot from C:, then it takes the
first partition from each of the rest of the disks as D, E, etc. after
that, it goes through the rest of the partitions and assign them drive
letters, which means that you might end up with a different drive letter
scheme each time you boot to another Windows system. So the Linux
disk/partitioning system especially makes sense if you think of it in
terms of consistency :)

> Okay, so sorry about this very long post, but I truly am hoping to make
> this work. Any suggestions are appreciated and even though I am a BIT,
> please take the time if possible to explain this as though I'm a five
> year old. All the searches I've done for this problem either are too
> confusing or don't address my problem and there doesn't seem to be a
> solution.

Just remember, Ubuntu installer asks where you want to install it in the
partitioning question. You can just choose that it deletes everything on
/dev/hdb and (check that it's the 2GB disk) and let it auto-partition
your space.

-Jonathan