Re: How do I launch the installer
1. What's on the second hard disk at the moment? Partitioned? Formatted?
Formatted ext3. Nothing on it. One partition.
Good luck installing XP onto that without reformatting or partitioning :-D
2. If it's NTFS or FAT32, you won't have to reformat it, as long as there's sufficient space.
I'd like to do part of it (most of it actually) as fat32 for data storage. Only 2G or so for the OS. If XP takes over the whole drive I may go with W95 instead.
2G is insufficient for XP.
Chop it up; make a 4G partition for the OS, and sort the rest out later. XP doesn't "take over" the whole disk; it presents you with the same disk partition tool we all grew to love with Windows NT.
3. You MAY have to physically swap the hard disks around. Hell, suck it and see. The XP installer commits you to nothing before the "choosing a partition to install on" stage.
Reboot the system and boot to cd, then it will ask what partition to go to. Okay. Will try.
Good. Don't be all pointy haired on me, now.
4. Remember, you don't have to install to drive C:
I'll have to see that the installer says. I don't really care what it calls the drives.
OK, so do that then.
5. The quickest and easiest way of having a partition that's read/write from both OSes is to use FAT32.
Except, as I said, for the warnings I've seen against doing that with XP.
There's nothing intrinsic about XP that means it won't work with FAT32. You don't get some benefits of NTFS (security, compression, encryption), but IT WILL WORK.
Implicitly condoning stupidity since 2001.
No shit.
;)