help/advice needed on bring AMD box with no system to life

[papau]

I run XP on many boxes.

My thought was a dual boot on the new AMD box

the old XP box had two hard drives.

Can I "move/copy" the "C" drive off the one drive that will be removed and onto the other drive that is staying, so that after removal of the original C drive the machine will boot to XP with just the remaining drive?

I have the linux iso for 64 bit on a DVD. Can I install from the DVD?

If I bring up XP on the AMD first, can I install linux over it - or is it best to put XP on one drive, then do a dual boot install of the Linux?

Do I install the windows software on Linux and again on XP? How? Do I run Wine in some way in doing the install of the win software on Linux? Or does Linux just need a single install on the Windows software on a FAT XP drive so as to access the windows software with Wine?

XP has acted wierd in the past when a hard drive with XP is moved to a new CPU motherboard machine. Is this still true - do I need to reinstall everything again including the XP OS after the hard drive with XP OS is moved to the new AMD machine?

[papau]

1. kick ... sigh ....

:-)

[bemildred]

2. More

http://www.sysopt.com/forum/printthread.php?threadid=148048

[papau]

4. Thanks

:-)

[bvar22]

3. We could use some more details.

If I understand correctly,

you want to physically remove the HardDrive that is currently your boot drive (C:\).

If you only copy or move the the files from your Primary Drive C:\ to the Secondary Drive (assuming D:\) prior to removing the Primary Drive, your system will not boot after you remove the Primary HD.
The Secondary Drive needs to have a Boot Sector that contains the boot system files before it will boot.

I used to do this with older versions of MSDOS and Windows, but I don't know if this is true with ME and XP.

In older versions, I was able to accomplish this by:

1) Using the Dos command "XCOPY C: D:"
2) Removing the Primary HardDrive
3) Resetting the jumper on the Secondary HD to Primary.
4) Booting from a floppy that had the OS and Commands.
5) Transferring the OS to the new Primary HD with a special command "sys a: c:" (thus making it bootable).

I hope this helps.

Summary: Just copying all the files from your Primary Drive won't make it bootable. The Boot Drive needs some special files in order to boot. Those special booting files can be transferred, but it is more complicated than just copying them.

[papau]

5. Thanks :-)

:-)

[papau]

6. How do we load an ISO image of Linux?

:-)

[salvorhardin]

7. Which distribution?

Some are easier than others. The last time I installed SuSE (9.1) it automagically recognized everything, partitioned my HD for me and set the machine up to dual boot. Although I've ran Linux for about 8 years now on my server I haven't run it on my desktop since about 1998. I was used to old school Debian installs. The SuSE install was a thing of beauty to watch and quite frankly, easier than installing Windows. However, your mileage may vary depending on the hardware you have.

Here's a handy resource: http://www.faqs.org/docs/lnag/lnag_before_install.html

Also, you can read some reviews of various distributions at: http://distrowatch.com

[papau]

8. thanks :-)

:-)

[salvorhardin]

9. No problem.

I'm always happy to help out someone else that wants to ditch Microsoft.

Working link for Distrowatch that I fscked up in my previous post: http://distrowatch.com

Also, I should mention that if you haven't decided on a distro yet, Ubuntu has been receiving very good reviews, though I've got to say I'm loving SuSE (which is now owned by Novell).

[papau]

10. I ordered the Ubuntu - but 6 week wait! - can it be installed over Fedora

later?

I am going to try this weekend to do an install Fedora core 3 AMD 64.

[salvorhardin]

11. That shouldn't be a problem.

I personally haven't tried Ubuntu, so I don't know how well it sets up a dual boot environment but most of the modern distros do it effortlessly.

Just be sure to back up anything important first though. If something goes wrong, you can well and truly pooch your Windows install. If you have Windows XP, you might want to read up on how to use the install disc's recovery console. Just in case. :-)

Anyway, now that I've probably scared you off Linux for good, probably the best thing is to try out several different distributions over the course of a few weeks. Many of them have Live CDs (which will allow you to try them out without installing them). In the end you'll become more familiar with Linux, along with discovering what is right for you.

Oh, and of course, there's always Knoppix if you want to try out Linux with your hardware before actually installing it. http://knoppix.org

BTW: I played with Fedora Core 2 when it first was released and the install is the typical effortless RedHat experience (but many people were having the install corrupt their MBR). The distro itself was pretty buggy at the time too, but I understand Core 3 is much better. The bugginess of Core 2 and certain philosophical issues I have with the Fedora project are why I chose another distro for my desktop. Also, while I love Debian's tenacious adherence to free (as in freedom) software, for my personal desktop I want something that just works -- and that includes everything multimedia. I got that in SuSE, although even there it required me downloading a handful of RPMs off Packman (http://packman.links2linux.org) to get the libraries needed to play certain proprietary codecs. That was simple enough though and all in all I'm enormously happy with my choice.

One last bit of advice -- if your printer is not well supported by CUPS (which you can find out by looking it up here), there is an affordable commercial alternative available from Turboprint. I had to go that route with my printer (a Canon Pixma iP4000) because it is rather new to market. Turboprint's CUPS driver performs flawlessly and provides every single feature supported by the official Canon driver under Windows.

The only outstanding issue I have is with my scanner, and oddly enough, that's because it's freaking OLD! Even then, if I got off my lazy arse and recompiled SANE, then even that would work. :-)

[papau]

12. Super info - thanks

:-)

[salvorhardin]

13. You're quite welcome.

I'd spout off pages and pages of stuff about Linux if you'd let me. :-)

While I'm here, probably the last thing you should be aware of is the difference between the two primary desktop environments in use out there -- KDE and Gnome. You'll be able to find screenshots of each if you poke around each site.

Certain distros tend to prefer one or the other, although I know of no distro that absolutely limits you to a specific desktop environment (other than a Live CD such as Knoppix where it wouldn't be possible to fit both).