Scratch

ummm... It has 2 hard drives. I was wondering if I could install Ubuntu on one drive and leave XP (already installed) on the other side.

I think this is possible. It is the same sort of thing as thebuilderdd said, but I really think that since your computer is a laptop, it is just a partitioned hard drive. My laptop is the same way. It has a 286GB C: partition, and a 11GB "Recovery" D: partition, but it is just one 300GB hard drive.

You certainly can do this, although I highly reccomend Pclinuxos over Ubuntu for doing it. I could not install Ubuntu to my external drive, but Pclinuxos worked fine. Firstly, you must find out which drive is sda and which is sdb. You need to select the one in the installer without Windows. This can be done pretty simply by opening both drives in Linux, and checking the size of each. Next, just start up the installer and select the empty drive to install to. Be sure to install Grub to the drive. Let it install, and then reboot and select the Linux drive in your bios and boot away.

16Skittles wrote:

what's grub?

It's the bootloader used at startup to choose which partition you want to boot from. It looks like this:


You can definitely install Linux on the D drive. Like others have said, I think it's more likely that there are just two partitions, C and D, one a single drive. (Fitting two drives into a laptop would be quite a feat.) My laptop was like that too; it had one 120GB drive and two 60GB partitions.

what-the wrote:

Please note if you installed Windows XP without a partition you cannot make one. You need to reformat and create a partition then.

it already has C:\ and D:\

Last edited by 16Skittles (2011-04-16 14:46:54)