i want to get a new hard drive for my laptop, and i've narrowed it down to three 250GB models and would like your advice on which i should get. i want to have an installation of XP on one partition, Ubuntu on a second, and is it possible to have a third partition i could drop files into in XP and retrieve them in Ubuntu? i'm thinking a 100/100/50 setup, would that work ok? i know this is the wrong forum for this question but as long as i'm here, is GRUB easy to set up? i could probably get help here or on ubuntuforums.com if something goes wrong or i get stuck right?
The ubuntu live/installation CD will set up GRUB for you, so that shouldn't be a problem. I have been told, though I've no experience of it (always used separate drives for dual boot machines) that you will have to install XP first as windows doesn't like not being on that first partition. You won't need a third partition for transferring files, linux can read from NTFS, no problems. LM.
Grub is easy to install, and most distros (like Ubuntu, Fedora,...) automatically set it up for a dual boot. Don't worry about it. In case it does go wrong, Grub has a (bash like) shell, which is great for troubleshooting. EDIT: You need to install XP first because Windows doesn't think about the possibility of having other OSs on the drive, thus overwrites the MBR and such. You won't need a 3rd partition, but it sure is handy... I would go for a partitioning scheme along the lines of: 1) 150MB /boot (ext2-3) 2) 150GB Windows (NTFS) 3) 30GB / (ext3) 4) Logic 5) 2*RAM swap 6) rest /home (ext3) That 6th partition is mountable in XP (install THIS and you can read & write to ext partitions from Windows, and you can alter the location of "My Documents" so that it points to the /home partition) and Linux (just mount it under /home) and all your stuff will be in the correct place. One note tough, Windows is picky yes... During XP install, I usually just create the NTFS partition (as the first one), install XP, and then use something like partition magic to move the partition a bit backwards. Then I just install Linux which is smart enough to handle it all
For the brand of hard drive just pick whichever one has the best specs/cheapest price. Brands make very little difference these days. Out of those 3 I'd go for the WD, simpy because it has some fancy features stated on the description from Newegg - they'll all be great drives.
