I am in the process of installing 3 HD on puter. One 20gig has WinXP Home, one 30gig undecided and one 160 gig. I am wanting to learn Linux. I am not programmer material, a hardware or software geek, just a 50ish user who is tired of Microsoft\'s resource grabbing software and money grubbing upgrade tactics.   SOooooooooooo, it was suggested that I may want to entertain setting up a drive for Linux, particular version to be established after input.

I know how to plug in a hard drive, install and ata/133 pci card for other two drives. I can access CMOS and Bios to set up boot sequence.  It was suggested Ubuntu may be a good candidate. So open for discussion.
Smiles,

If a couple conditions apply I would do the following...

Conditons:
1. SATA drive capacity on your motherboard
2. up to 2 SATA drives
3. up to 4 PCI drives (3 if you have a CD/DVD 2 if you have CD & DVD drives
4. if you don\'t already have the hardware, the willingness to buy SATA drives

Now with all that said...

1. You don\'t need three drives for Linux (remember the memory grubbing...)
2. If you want to install three drives Linux (just about any flavor should be fine)
3. It is NOT necessary to set your swap file and your main Linux OS on different partitions... in fact I have never heard of anyone doing it that way.

Your MOTHERBOARD is going to determine who boots first so set that up and you should be ready to rock and roll (remember all the drives will need to be setup as linux partitions and not Windoze [FAT/Fat32/NTFS].

Like to know how you make out... keep us all informed!

So if I understand I will need to put linux on all three drives.  

Yes you need Linux on all three drives if you want to use (save files to etc...) Linux on all three drives. This is rarely the case and you should only need to put Linux on one drive... if you need more you can format the drives accordingly and Linux will automatically \'pick them up\' when you run the OS.

So now I am all confused. I can install Linux on a windows drive right, it will auto partition the drive to suit it. Because there are some things I have to do in windows, some of my genealogy stuff. I have to keep a Win os as well.
the 160 is open and the 30 is open for stuff.  wanted to use the 160 as a storage drive.

Yes, you will partition the drive with part of the drive as a Linux drive and part of the drive as a Windows drive.

With that being said... in the most layman of terms, you will NOT be able to access any of your windows files and windows will not even see there is Linux on the system.

When you install Linux you will install a Boot Loader (use GRUB). It will give you a choice to which operating system you want to boot to (Linux/Windows).

I would NOT put Linux on all three of your drives for now. I would put Linux on part of your drive that has windows on it and go from there.

Remember when partitioning... you want a Linux (2 or 3) partition and a SWAP partition that is to be no larger than 128MB.

The Linux partition can be any size over I\'d recommend 4GB... you can make it as large or as small as you want. I use 40GB for Linux and 250GB for Windows on a 300GB drive.