New Hard Drive

[werdna5225]

I am getting ready to replace my old hard drive with a new 250 Gig hard drive.
I want to load an ubuntu linux system and my old windows system both on this hard drive, I read that partitioning helps speed, so how would I go about partitioning my drive? Also, how do I transfer all of my old hard drive to the new one, and do I install linux first? Should I try to use my old hard drive as a slave? If so, what would its purpose be?

 

[PC eye]

If you plan to slave the first drive to the new one there are few different things you can do there. First Windows has to be installed onto the 1st primary of a new drive. Plus ubuntu uses a totally different type of boot loader namely Grub or Lilo that can installed to the drive. But that would have to be on the root partition not into the Windows mbr.

With the old drive setup as a slave you some options there. You can simply use it as a storage drive to back up one or both OSs or use it strictly as a Linux drive. You could split the drive there and have two small storage partitions one for Windows and one for ubuntu. You could simply add one for backing Linux files. On the primary you would then use a second partition for backing Windows files.

You could clone the present Windows installation onto the new drive. But a fresh installation onto a clean primary will see better results. The XP if XP installer has a partitioning and formatting process already included for NTFS type partitions. For Linux you would need a Linux partitioning tool since Linux distros run on vfat type partitions. Most newer releases include the Linux version of fdisk or cfdisk.

One tool that will create both Linux and NTFS type partitions is called GParted. This will create, delete, and even resize partitions and is available free at http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/gparted/gparted-livecd-0.3.1-1.iso?download

Once burned on a cd-r not rw as a bootable disk you simply boot from it to bring up it's own type of desktop gui for detecting both drives at that time and to create the new one or more partitions. You would need the Windows and Linux tools to see those partitions formatted.