Duel Harddrives

[strangely made]

Hi all, was just wondering, I've got a portable hard drive (Well it's Elvi's but it doesn't work on her PC :( ) is there a way of combining it with the inbuilt 'C' drive on my PC?

If not can I put programs on it and then access them in the usual way?

Oooh, and if you could explain in a 'Alice and Jerry' type way.....don't do technical words but can follow instruction

[Brandon]

Im going to assume you mean an external hard drive, not a portable one. Feel free to correct me if Im wrong here

Anyway, I bought my first external hard drive last year and had a lot of the same questions. First off you need to hook it up to your machine, usually they have a USB port (its a wide and very thin depthwise male connection) you can use to hook into your machine. After its hooked in your machine should say something about new hardware and needing to name the hard drive or someting like that, if it doesnt then more then likely you can go into where you usually view your drives and see the new one.

You can access programs from the external hard drive as well, mine has WoW, Crysis, Bioshock and a few other games on it and they run fine from there. However if your trying to put in a program you may get a messege that says something like "this is a root drive and it cant put it there" the fix to that is as simple as making a folder titled Games, or movies, or something like that and saving that info in the folder.

I hope that wasnt too technical

[strangely made]

Yeah, that's what I did done mean. External..called it portable because you can carry them around

Well, all I'll say is I thinkI understand:)

[Jester]

You wont be able to merge them no.

Should be fine installing programmes on it and putting anything else on there really 

However you will need to make different steps if you wanted to boot from it. e.g. Having a different operating system.

Howver i get the feeling you wont want to do that :-)

[strangely made]

I might use it to test out Linux when I get it, so duel booting is one option I be taking advantage of yes

[ZK]

Now when it comes to booting from Linux on a seperate HDD. You're going to run into some technical bits. I.E. having to drop command lines and such. Depending on what form you have of Linux.

Just hope you do not have to compile any source code.

[Kradorex Xeron]

There's some potential implications with having an OS on a USB HDD, for one, USB 2.0 interfaces max out at 480 Mbps (60 MB/s which with overhead, down to 40-50 MB/s) -- most internal HDDs have 100-300 MB/s, so given these numerics, and the fact that RAM does get used up and systems usually end up depending on virtual memory (aka swap, windows equiv = pagefile) which on the hard disk, alot of USB bandwidth would be used up swapping and applications would operate MUCH slower than if they were to operate off an internal hard disk. External USB HDDs are really not designed for desktop operating systems to be installed, Though it is possible.

NB:
Mbps = Megabits per second, 8 bits = 1 byte, therefore: 8 Mbps = 1 MB/s
MB/s = MegaBytes per Second

[Elvi]

*blinks*

No wonder Strangely's head has just popped....*grins*

[Keiro]

LOL.

Typical of Krad. >_> <_<

I understood what he said.

He's saying that it's not all that good for Linux, and to be honest, I agree.

It IS doable...but it'd be crazy-hard to get it working in Linux.

[strangely made]

So , clear enough space on the C drive, have Linux on there and things should be fine. Have other stuff on the E drive and access them as I want.

[Keiro]

Eh. You also have to have enough space for the swap partition.

So, give it maybe 50 gigs, if you have it. 40 for the rest, 10 gigs for the swap.

If that's no go...well, use something like that. >_> <_< -Has a 400 GB HDD.-

And around 97% of that is free.

I could probably set up dual-boot that way.

But meh...your way works as well, just make sure to format the other hard drive as...oh wait, are you using Windows too?

[strangely made]

Errrmmmmmmmmmm, got a 20 gig hard drive, and a 80 gig external drive.

I thought that I only needed 4 gig for Ubuntu, now I'm more confused. Will I be able to use it or not?

[Keiro]

Sure you can.

But it's recommended that you give it more. I'm not quite sure of the ratios, but something like 15 gigs for the partition and 5 gigs for the swap. Or something like that.

Krad's the best person to ask, to be honest.

I've only fiddled around with settings like that twice, and it's been a long time since I did fiddlings like that.

To be honest, you could...ahhhh. Hmm.

Err, yeah, Krad's the best one to ask. x_x but it should, at the very least, have a large enough swap and partition to handle everything.