TR Forums

I'm planning on adding another HD to my current setup, plugging it into the slave port of my existing IDE cable. I'm planning to use this HD to install Linux, just to play around with it.

I would like to know how you would go around setting it to boot up so I can still use my Windows HD to bootup whenever I need it. Also wondering, how much power does a HD consume, just want to make sure my PSU can handle it.

Thanks in advance.

if you install linuix onto another hard drive when you boot up it will boot to your primary hard drive and if it detects two oses it will give you a option to boot to linuix or boot to dos (what it means by that is a dos based os. ie windows of sometype)

Actually, the bios boot direction will be to either of your two hard drives, (not either/or switchable) if both are on the same channel. So you have to flip your bios setting between the two HDs on the same channel to alternate between OS's. Not a big deal, but you'd need to slip into bios to reset the boot HD if you wanted to change the OS from the last one you used.

I expect that you would only have a choice of OS (without changing bios setting) at boot if you had both OS's on different partitions of the same HD.