Where does it go...

BoomAM

BoomAM

BoomAM

Soldato
Joined
5 Jul 2003
Posts
16,206
Location
Atlanta, USA
Hi.
Im thinking of buying a small HDD to mess around with Linux on.

If i was to get myself an internal SATA based drive, would it write the bootloader to my primary HDD? If so, which part of the primary HDD? & if i wanted to get rid of it, how would i go about doing that?

Would this a) work & b) be better: If i got an external HDD, installed Linux onto that, and then set my BIOS to give that drive boot priority. Would that then prevent the Linux installer from changing anything on my other drives?

Thanks in advance all.
 
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Most distros these days should install to an SATA drive but double-check first. Normally the bootloader writes to the MBR, it's simple to delete if you have an XP cd just by booting into the rescue mode (Google it, it's simple trust me).

I shouldn't worry about the expense of external drives, are you looking at dual-booting this machine or running it purely as a linux machine?
 
Dual booting.

Im tempted to go the external drive route to be honest. As long as i kept a 30Gb NTFS partition free on the external drive, i could also use the drive as the destination drive that the IBM software on my Thinkpad backs up to.

Will the external drive idea work?
 
Well im asuming that it does.
As if i have my iPod (or my old iRiver when i had it), plugged in on boot, i can see it in the BIOS under the list of bootable device order.
So i asume that i can. :)

Hmm. I might actually give it a bash sometime.

Thanks for the help guys/gals/misc :p
 
Go with the internal unless you need portability IMO.

All modern distros will boot from SATA fine, and they will also detect your WinXP system and add that into their bootloader.
 
If i have it internal, it'll modify the boot sectors of my Windows drive. I dont want it to do that.
I was thinking of going the Firewire route anyway.
Its a heck of a lot faster than USB for constant transfer rates and wouldnt impede performance all that much.
 
dirtydog said:
Why not just use another partition on your existing HDD rather than buy a new drive?
Click to expand...
Because i dont want to risk, in any way, shape or form, my windows drive/my data.

And i know that im now gonna get thousends of posts claiming that the risk is minimal, and it can easyily be fixed.
But the decision has been made. I will not use a solution that involves even the tinyest risk to my data by modifying the boot sectors of my current HDDs.

Plus, with an external solution, if i got a big enough HDD, i could use part of it for backups of my laptop as well. Two birds with one stone so to say. :)
 
brainiac ghost said:
or you could always have the windows drive unplugged during the install, then plug it in after the MBR has been written to the other drive
Click to expand...

Except then he won't be able to boot his Linux partition without fiddling each time.

Anyway. For the record, the risk is minimal, but I know I wouldn't want to take any chances if it was my first time. The odds of Linux screwing up your Windows data are next to 0 (can't easily write to NTFS for one thing) but the odds of an inexperienced user making a mistake and screwing things up are much, much higher.
 
Experiance isnt a problem.
The fact that there is a risk, no matter how small, concerns me. As i have my project work on my windows drives.

Again, the decision has been made. I will not be doing any type of install of Linux that involves the modification of any of my main drives. End of.
 
BoomAM said:
Experiance isnt a problem.
The fact that there is a risk, no matter how small, concerns me. As i have my project work on my windows drives.

Again, the decision has been made. I will not be doing any type of install of Linux that involves the modification of any of my main drives. End of.
Click to expand...

That's fair enough, but given that the risk of Linux destroying a drive it's not even touching is vastly less than the risk of any OS, not least Windows, losing data on a drive it is using, I'm not sure where your fears are based. User error would be the only thing likely to cause a problem in this situation.

Anyway. Your mind is made up and I don't disagree with your decision. Just trying to break up a bit of the FUD.
 
Your asumptions of it being 100% safe appear to be based upon the premice that installing another copy of windows would have the same 'problems'.
Which im not denying that its not.
But. The simple fact is that messing with the boot sector of a drive that already has an OS on it there is risk that something can go wrong.
If the drive had nothing on it, then there would be no risk. But the drive does have something on it.
You appear to be making the asumption that any piece of software that can modify the boot sector, wether its from MS or if its OpenSource, is perfect. When its not. It'll be designed to be as bug free as possible, but errors can occur in the most well written of software, and all it takes is a minor HW error, be it a power fluctuation from the PSU, or just a bug that could be been missed in testing, or something else, for the software to act in a way that it wasnt designed to. And for a program that modifys the boot sector, that can amount to a big problem.
With using an external HDD, i wouldnt be risking anything importent, at all.
 
Needless to say I hope you've got backups of your project work etc. if it's that important :) (Not that I'm saying that this should change your mind about installing Linux on your existing drive as your mind is clearly made up)
 
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