Installing Linux soon.

[SwollenBeef]

What i was going to do was partition my existing HDD (160gb) to run both windows and Linux, but i figured that would be too much of a hassle, and i wanted the extra storage space so i purchased another 160 GB drive and i plan to use this as storage and to run Linux on.

Now, what i plan to do, is all the crap i have for FTP and other server related issues, move it to the new drive, and use Linux to distribute it, along with other things.

Will i have to do anything special to the new drive? or will the distro see these files from the start without me having to do anything special?

[Freston]

Welcome to the forums SwollenBeef!

Now, what i plan to do, is all the crap i have for FTP and other server related issues, move it to the new drive, and use Linux to distribute it, along with other things.

Will i have to do anything special to the new drive? or will the distro see these files from the start without me having to do anything special?

I'd do it the other way around. First install Linux, and then transfer the files.

The reason is that you'll want to create a native Linux filesystem on your new HD, and while you're at it you'll probably want to partition your drive as well. And that procedure tends to be a little fatal to data on the drive, unless you want to do it the hard way.

[Gorgeous George]

If you are new to linux you may end up needing to reinstall a few times, especially if you plan on tinkering and trying out different distro's. What you may like to do is have 2 hard disks and use one of them for operating systems and the other one for storage so that it is safe and well out of harms way.
If you choose to do this you will want to have your storage disk formated as NTFS so that you can use it from both linux and windows. I say use NTFS because the linux drivers for NFTS are flawless (in my experience) the same however cannot be said for the windows ext2/ext3 drivers.

[SwollenBeef]

Well, i was thinking of taking the new drive and partitioning about half of it for linux use, and the other half could just be used for storage.
as of now, there is no data on the drive, so there is no data to lose when i do partition/install a distro.

I guess i need to partition the drive, install the distro, and then start to move files?

[techieMoe]

Well, i was thinking of taking the new drive and partitioning about half of it for linux use, and the other half could just be used for storage.
as of now, there is no data on the drive, so there is no data to lose when i do partition/install a distro.

I guess i need to partition the drive, install the distro, and then start to move files?

If you're going to only use part of the drive for Linux, I would recommend partitioning only the area you want to keep separate and leaving the rest of the drive unpartitioned (and unformatted). When you decide to install a Linux distribution the installer should give you the option to "Install using free space". That will let the installer do its own partitioning on the area you left blank.