Dual boot juggling

My old machine (now mother's work pc ) runs on an Asus M2N, which only supports two IDE devices at a time. She has two IDE hard drives (40GB each) and a DVD drive. She rarely needs to install anything or read a DVD generally so I figured we can just unplug the DVD and connect the two IDE hard disks at all times. So far so good.

The thing is that I want to install a Linux distribution (probably Ubuntu or OpenSuse) for more security, when she simply wants to surf the net. Here's where the problem lies. I can't have the first drive (XP), second drive (to-be-Linux) and DVD (installation CD) all connected at once.

It would be easier if I install the distro on a second partition of the same drive with XP. But I am afraid that 40GB is not enough space for two OSs to breathe. What I want to do is disconnect the XP drive, install linux on the second drive and then connect them back together. If the XP system is not there when GRUB is being installed, I suppose it will not be detected and not considered in the boot options. How hard is it to do that manually after the installation? Also the windows MBR on the other drive will not be automatically overwritten, so there could be conflicts from that too.

Alternatively, can I install just the boot partition (5GB?) on the same disk with XP and then make /home and swap partitions in the spare disk?

 

Why don't you get a SATA hard drive (500GB are about $60), that MB has 4 SATA internal connectors. Then you can run XP & Ubuntu from the SATA drive & still have the IDE DVD attached.

That's assuming the MB is one of the following?
http://www.asus.com/Motherboards/M2NMX/
http://www.asus.com/Motherboards/M2N/

You can also put the DVD in an external case & attach via USB.

Knowing exactly which MB you have would be a big help.

Note if you want to install Ubuntu, it's simplest to have XP & Ubuntu on the same drive (separate partitions). When you do that XP is installed first then Ubuntu gets installed on the second partition which gets created during install. Grub will auto detect both installs & give you the option of which to boot into. If Grub doesn't than you simply open a terminal & type (sudo update-grub), when you reboot both OS will be in the Grub boot menu.

I wouldn't try putting XP & Ubuntu on a 40GB HD. If you want to install Ubuntu download Ubuntu 12.04.4 LTS Precise, you will likely have trouble with the newer Ubuntu 14.04 LTS Trusty (again that depends on your actuall MB).

 

As Lapetus said, but if all your mother does is use the internet, email etc why not just replace XP with Linux?
That way you improve her security and you won't have any issues with dual booting. Or the risk involved with tinkering around with drives.
Just back up all her personal files to the secondary HDD and install Linux on the primary. Then you can copy them back to her Linux Home folder after the install.
As she's used to Windows I'd suggest OpenSuse or Kubuntu, as the KDE desktop will be more familiar to her then Ubuntu's Unity desktop. Or there's Linux Mint with the Cinnamon desktop. It comes with all multimedia codecs out of the box, if she needs those, that is.

 

That'd be great but she absolutely needs to open one windows application for her work. If I could get that app to run on Linux I might have been able to switch her completely. It's an oldfashioned DOS-based program so I assume it will be easy to emulate. No complicated graphics etc. Yet, I'm not sure if I want an important work app to be run in an improvised manner, maybe it's better to stick with the dual boot. Maybe we could have a live USB stick with Linux on it. The mobo is the second link.

 

Hi

If it's a DOS program it may run in Dosbox which you can install in Linux, or indeed any operating system. I've used it to run old DOS games in Win7. It will be in the software repositories of most Linux distros, so the install will be straightforward. You can install a graphical front end for it as well. To make life easier. http://www.tecmint.com/dosbox-runs-old-ms-dos-games-and-programs-in-linux/
Or there's Wine http://www.winehq.org/ which will enable you to run some Windows applications in Linux. Click on the AppDB tab to check the list.
It really depends on the particular application she uses. You could search Google for the application name + Linux and see what results you get.
You should try downloading the live versions of whichever Linux distros you want to try. Then your mother can boot into one of those and give it a try out without installing anything. So she can learn her way around before taking the install step.
The first step I'd suggest though, as someone else said, would be to increase the size of your primary HDD and preferably use SATA.