I found an old maxtor 8 Gb hard drive, and I was wanting to install it so I could run a linux distro off of it.

Unfortunately, while I do have a spare drive bay, getting the drive into it would be very difficult due to the fact that the mobo is only a few inches from the slot and getting the drive in there would mean running the risk of hitting the cpu with the drive. There's also a rats nest of cables and other s*** in the way. Compaq cases are not upgrade-friendly by any means, and by looking at it, I could assume it sure as hell wasn't meant to be touched by its owner.

Since i don't have the full computer specs (only a simple manual that only a newbie would get any use from) I don't want to start taking things apart with reckless abandon.

So, I was wondering if I could simply place the hard drive on the bottom of the case. would it hurt it to touch metal while it is on (assuming that the side with the exposed citcuitry is facing up? )

another plan would be to place the drive in it's expansion side things (provided so the drive could fit in a cd-rom size bay) and then duct tape that to the bottom of the case so it wouldn't move. That way, the drive would not be touching metal. (the expander gives it a tiny ammount of clearance. )


BTw, regardless of how i mount the drive, I will have to jumper it as a slave. will linux work off of a slave drive? I don't plan to dual boot due to two bad experiences with getting windows and linux to co-exist.

I plan to use a boot disk to get into linux so I won't have to mess with the boot loader, b/c nothing good has ever come of me messing with it in the past.

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Old aunts used to come up to me at weddings, poking me in the ribs and cackling, telling me, "You're next." They stopped after I started doing the same thing to them at funerals.

[This message has been edited by Pagewizard_YKS (edited June 12, 2004).]

If I press F8 during the bios I can choose which drive to boot to although that's a motherboard specific feature. Yours may have a similar feature.

As for mounting the drive itself, I've had drives hanging out of the case and they've worked fine. I dont know about touching metal though.




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WARNING: THIS POST MAY CONTAIN TRACES OF PEANUT!
----@%

I used to have a case that had a space above the power supply, made to hold a 3.5 inch hard disk. So there's no problem keeping the hard disk on metal, as long as the metal is flat and nothing touches the circuit board underneath the drive.

I have a 8bg Fujitsu as a slave drive for Linux, and I haved used both LILO and Grub for dual-booting, and have never had any problems. I think Partition Magic, though, can make you a boot disk that will boot from another partition or hard drive, but I'm not sure.

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When guitars are outlawed, only outlaws will have guitars.

Above the PSU? That's one of the hottest places in the case.. i'm not sure thats a great idea.


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WARNING: THIS POST MAY CONTAIN TRACES OF PEANUT!
----@%

No space around a hard drive means no airflow, which means potential overheating problems. It should be OK, but I'd never subject a drive to that myself.

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The Massassi-Map
There is no spoon.

1) Just stick it anywhere. Hard drives dont need that much protection...

2) Yeah, LInux can boot off of a slave, no problem...


[BTW, this is post #12345... ]

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Dear lady, can you hear the wind blow, and did you know
Your stairway lies on the whispering wind.
:wq

BTW, does linux give me the option to install to that drive (would it be hda2 if my xp drive is hda1?) , and can I make a boot disk thatis guaranteed to let me boot to that drive without messing with the XP bootloader?

Partition magic will probably do it, but the demo of partition magic will not do squat. I don't want to buy it just for this one thing, and I don't want to crack it if I can help it...


I'm leaving nothing to chance. I want to have all the facts before I try this.

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Old aunts used to come up to me at weddings, poking me in the ribs and cackling, telling me, "You're next." They stopped after I started doing the same thing to them at funerals.

[This message has been edited by Pagewizard_YKS (edited June 12, 2004).]

[This message has been edited by Pagewizard_YKS (edited June 12, 2004).]

Some distros will, some wont. SuSE will, but the rest Im not too sure about. What distro were you planning on installing?

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Dear lady, can you hear the wind blow, and did you know
Your stairway lies on the whispering wind.
:wq

..And no, if this drive is a slave on the primary cable, itll be /dev/hdb. Most distros will give you the option upon install to create boot disks...

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Dear lady, can you hear the wind blow, and did you know
Your stairway lies on the whispering wind.
:wq

primary master = /dev/hda
primary slave = /dev/hdb
secondary master = /dev/hdc
secondary slave = /dev/hdd

and each partition is /dev/hda1, /dev/hda2...

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http://www.sporkaudio.com

Knoppix (which turns into plain old debian when installed if i understand correctly)

BTW, i got the drive installed, and I've been reunited with my old files from 1999-2000. Windows xp detected it with no problems. i didn't even have to run that old-school maxtor max-blast floppy or even the add hardware wizard for that matter. Amazing, b/c this drive predates plug and play.


The only potential problem is that the drive
cables were too short to reach the bottom of the case, so I have the drive at a tilt titanic-style right now. I don't know if that's good for it, but i have nothing I can put underneath it to level it out. The cables fit in quite snugly, so i doubt it will pull out.

I'm going to burn them (primarily some mp3 files downloaded during Napster's heyday) and then turn the disk into a 8 gb linux drive.

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Old aunts used to come up to me at weddings, poking me in the ribs and cackling, telling me, "You're next." They stopped after I started doing the same thing to them at funerals.



[This message has been edited by Pagewizard_YKS (edited June 12, 2004).]

Btw, what file(s) controls the xp bootloader? i want to archive it just in case the worst happens I can quickly swap in the working bootloader and get windows back fast.



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Old aunts used to come up to me at weddings, poking me in the ribs and cackling, telling me, "You're next." They stopped after I started doing the same thing to them at funerals.

Although I can't say anything about booting Linux off of it, I can tell you that it is safe to place it just about anywhere. Level to the ground is preffered, though it can live (for a while, anyway) without it. I know how tamper-hostile Compaq cases are, but perhaps you might be able to find space to place it somewhere, even outside of the case. Of course, from what you say, it will be sharing an IDE cable, which could pose problems. However, you needn't worry about any part of the drive touching any part of the case; after all, many HDDs have another HDD right beneath them, typically without any clearance. The tilt is the only problem, though. I believe the disbalance in rotating the drive platters might result in slower read/write speeds, and an increase in the rate of disk corruption (though it's an inevitable with ALL HDDs, I must admit).

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"I know there's got to be some sort of mathematical equation for this sort of thing, but I prefer trial and error. It's one of the advantages of having a socialized health care system."

The knoppix installer, IIRC, does not prompt you where to install. Remove your primary hard drive (but leave your 8gb as slave) before installing. Otherwise, Knoppix might eat your Windows install.

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Dear lady, can you hear the wind blow, and did you know
Your stairway lies on the whispering wind.
:wq

I assume that you meant simply removing the data and power cables for my main drive instead ofphysically taking it out of the dock. an actyal removal would be quite difficult.



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Old aunts used to come up to me at weddings, poking me in the ribs and cackling, telling me, "You're next." They stopped after I started doing the same thing to them at funerals.

..Yes, just disconnect it. Or disable it in the BIOS...your choice.

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Dear lady, can you hear the wind blow, and did you know
Your stairway lies on the whispering wind.
:wq

Dual Boot between Linux and Windows works fine.

It worked between WindowsXP and Linux SuSE 9.0 professional the first time...

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"Bantha's are filthy animals.......I don't eat filthy animals."

"Laugh it up Fuzzball!"
-Han Solo

I later opted for redhat again, b/c it saves me
from downloading large iso files and it gives you a lot of software.

The installer is much more sophisticated than the knoppix one, and it gave me the choice to install to hdb after i told it not to mess with either hda or the bootloader.

Windows xp works fine and boots by default, and redhat works fine when I boot up with a disk.



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Old aunts used to come up to me at weddings, poking me in the ribs and cackling, telling me, "You're next." They stopped after I started doing the same thing to them at funerals.

I wouldn't see why. The hard drive case get's grounded from the mounting screws anyway, so touching it to some other part of the machine won't make a difference.