I Want to try out linux

Hey guys,
im new to linux and i want to try it out right now i got a windows xp box wich you all probly frown apon but i want to make a dual boot system, i want to get a second harddrive and load linux onto that and select wich hard drive to boot from in bios. i was wondering would this work, and what is better to learn on Mandrake Or Redhat i have both but have not installed it or purchased the second harddrive until sure this will work
my specs of my machine are

Motherboard Aopen AX45-8XN
CPU Pentium 4 2.4B Ghz
Memory 512 MB Corsair pc 3200
Video Geforce 2 mx 200 (till i get a better one looking at the radeon 9600 pro)
PCI Cards Audigy Platnium, Soyo USB 2.0 Hub
Storage Western Digital 1200 JB
CD/DVD/Optical Drives Lite-on 48x12x48 and Lite-on 16x DVD-Rom


Thanks for the help it will be highly appriceated

Can I ask for your reasons on why you want to make out the change to Linux? I'd recommend either Mandrake or Red Hat for starting people.

I am a newbie as well, I tried mandrake 9.0 first and it has a lot of features, but I swithced to Rehat 9.0 and have had a lot less problems, but either way for us beginners thes are probably the easiest 2, I tried slackware 9.0, I figured "only one cd, should be easy, right?" not really, take a lot more knowhow than I have right now.

I would recomend as one newbie to another ...don't try the dual boot, if one messes up the other won't usally boot either and you are stuck ofline with no help. or you accidently go full linux like I did (wiped out my XP installation)by a messup with the diskdrake partitioning wizard

best way in my opinion is grab a second computer or get somethng like the Romtec Trios hard drive selector and keep the 2 OSes completely separate on the same computer, You can always throw a small 3rd HDD on the slave to transfer files between the 2, note only the fat32 file system can currently be read and wrote to by both OSes (I think I saw somewhere about some fixes for working with windows NTFS partitions with linux, but I dont' remember where)

Linux can read only a windows NTFS partiition, windows cannot read anything in linux unless it is on a fat32 windows partition

If you actually install it on a seperate physical hard drive, then you shouldn't have to be afraid of dual booting. Since they are physically isolated, there aren't many bad things that could actually happen.

It is very much as StominRound says in that Mandrake is much easier to set up, and it has a bit more bells and whistles than RedHat has (most notably, RedHat ships without MP3 and movie playing programs, but that can be installed afterwards), but RedHat often proves to be more stable. RedHat is also really easy to set up, though, but Mandrake is even easier. The choice is up to you.