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I am adding a secondary hard drive to my dell tower. I am wanting to duel boot Windows XP and Slackware Linux. I currently have only Windows XP on my computer, but I am not sure what formating it has on it.

My question is: what format should I use on the secondary drive for Linux? Does it need to be the same as the format on the primary drive?

Thanks in advance :)

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  • Latest Post Latest Post by zelkea

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Short answer: the secondary drive does not need to use the same filesystem as the Windows primary. For a Linux-only system partition the practical, well-supported choice today is ext4 (reliable, journaling, wide distro support). If the secondary disk will hold files that must be read from Windows XP as well, use an NTFS data partition for sharing; FAT32 is compatible but limited (4 GB max file size) and generally not recommended for modern use.

For a Slackware install (and similar manual-install distros) a common, sensible layout on the secondary drive is:

  • one ext4 partition for / (20–50 GB is typical unless many packages will be installed),
  • optional separate ext4 /home sized for personal data,
  • a swap area (use a swap partition or a swapfile). Make swap at least as large as RAM only if hibernation is required; otherwise 1–2 GB is usually sufficient on older machines.

Boot and partition notes: on XP-era hardware the system is almost certainly BIOS/MBR — installing GRUB to the primary drive MBR is the usual way to get a boot menu for both Windows and Linux. As an alternative, GRUB can be installed to the secondary drive and the BIOS boot order changed. Always have Windows recovery media or a backup before touching boot sectors.

To identify current formats before touching disks (from Windows XP: Computer → Manage → Disk Management). From a Linux live CD/USB:

sudo lsblk -f
sudo blkid
sudo fdisk -l

As pointed out, installers will perform formatting, but choosing ext4 for Linux system partitions and NTFS for a shared data partition gives the best mix of performance, reliability, and Windows interoperability for the scenario described by .

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Member Avatar for zelkea

Hey Sudo Bash,

During the installation of which ever linux disto you choose it will automatically format the drive for you.

Here is a write up on how to dual boot your system with Ubuntu https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WindowsDualBoot.

Another option you might want to consider depending on your resources is running virtualbox www.virtualbox.org which can run linux within your XP installation. If you are running a celeron processor with 512mb of ram it would not be recommended. If you are unsure if your system could handle it you can try it since the software is free.

I have been running Virtualbox for my linux OS on Windows 7 for several months now without a problem.

Zelkea

Member Avatar for Sudo Bash

Thanks,

I use Linux a lot, but I have never actually installed it myself. Thanks for your help.

Member Avatar for zelkea

Not a problem installation is simple now compared to several years ago.

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