[buttonsmum]

Darn, borrowed Julies laptop but its Entwisi


its easy as long as you have a basic understanding of disks and partitions.

it does depend on what sort of interface you have (IDE or SATA) as well,

when the linux install disk boots it will scan the installd HDs, I will take the example of IDE to explain the process, SATA just have a different name

when it gets to partitioning the disks you will need to choose 'custom', then you will be presented with a logical view of your drives, the master on ide0 will be known as hda, the slave as hdb, the master on ide1 as hdc and slave as hdd, if you have one of these 'missing' then they all step down one.

Within each drive it will name each partition so you end up with hda1, hda2, hdb1 etc

normally most people will only have one drive so you only have to deal with hda(1,2,3,4, etc). In your case you would need to make sure that you work only with hdb and create the partitions on it. IF YOU GET IT WRONG AND USE HDA YOU WILL OVERWRITE YOUR WINDOWS INSTALL so be sure!!!


From there on in its just a normal linux install.

Now for a techie bit
I would say that those in the know don't create a single partition for Linux. you store all your docs, etc in /home so you would have a single partition for that, then the actual install would go across a couple of others, its sensible to put /boot on one, / on another and then optionally /var and /usr on their own, the last two can share or even be on / (Don't worry if this last bit didn't make sense its all about how linux does filesystems which is different from windows but when you get used to it makes far more sense)