PCA Forums

I'm using win xp and have an Abit KR7A (NON RAID) mobo. I would like to add a Linux OS and was wondering if I could add another hdd without a raid mobo?

A motherboard without an onboard raid controller, such as your motherboard, can support up to 4 devices. Two on the primary channel and two on the secondary channel. Asumming you don't have a drive on each one of these channels then yes, you can add another hard drive without getting an add-on controller.

However, if you, say, have two hard drives and two CD-Roms (thus leaving you with no more "space" for expansion) then yes you will need to buy a controller card you can stick in the PCI slot and it doesn't necessarily have to be a raid controller. If you list your PC specs (including all hard drives, CD-ROMs, etc.) I can help ya out a bit more...

Or you could free some space on your HDD(s) for Linux, around 4GB+ would be ideal.
Do as Hipnotic_Tranz said, post some more details about your drives.

Thanks to both of you for your help. Both options are possible. Here's the system: WinXP, Athlon XP 1800+, ABIT KR7A mobo, 512 DDR RAM, 40GB 7200RPM Maxtor Hdd, CDRW, CD Rom, 430 Watt P/S (and a nicely modded box, may I add, hehe).

Using my existing mobo, if I added a 2nd Hdd, and I do have one IDE connection for it, I assume I could make it slave to the existing one? Would the Hdd size make a difference?

If I go with partitioning the existing Hdd, would I then have to make my NTFS into Fat32? I kind of like the single harddrive concept. I have Partition Magic 7.0 if needed.

Well, you can use PM7 to resize your partition if it's FAT32 (defrag prior to resize), not sure if it can do the same when you got NTFS.

Linux uses it's own filesystem, it's no FAT and no NTFS, so just leave the new space (hdd) unpartitioned, Linux can do the partitioning for the required minimum of 2 partitions.

You can just plugin another HDD, the ATA66/100 cable do some sort of cable-select like in the old times, doubt you even have to set the master/slave jumper (though it wouldn't hurt).

I can help you preparing for a Linux/XP multiboot in the OS Forum, there are some things to look out for.

Partition Magic does resize NTFS partitions. One thing to look out for is Linux has read-only support for NTFS, write support is still considered experimental and could damage data. Be careful with PCI controller cards. I know my PCI RAID card isn't detected by Slackware 8.1 install kernel.

i have two hard drives split into 4 partition running off a promise pci card - disk 1 is c: wim98/e:apps
disk2 id d: win2k f: internet tomfoolery

i use the regular ata channels for 1)dvd and cdr 2)cdrw and zip

it's slow booting b/c 2k always seems to have to detect the promise card - but i run 2k so it's not really an issue 'cause i don't boot very often - i have had this setup for several years - it was first set up on a bx baord and theni i simply migrated the who thing to a kt266 baord -

you could probably do something similar - although you do need to keep the cdr type devices on the regular ata channels -