Joan--
Why would you want to do that to begin with?
The boot manager will have to be installed on the first drive anyway; it will not care which drive either OS is installed on. Thus, you should be able to leave the XP where it is and install Linux on the second drive if you wish.
However, you would get more performance if you put the swap partition on the other drive from where the rest of Linux is installed--and, for that matter, if you created a small partition for the virtual RAM file in Windows and ran that from the other drive there.
Let's say, therefore, that you were to leave your XP install on drive A. Grub would go there, and it would pick up the XP install as well as the new Linux install. On it, too, you would create a small swap partition for Linux--one and a half times the RAM amount would be plenty for that purpose in most cases unless you have very little RAM to begin with, then two times would be a bit better. On drive B, you'd create the rest of the Linux install plus a small Windows formatted partition for the swap file there.
Remember that nearly every 40 GB drive out there will be fairly slow, quite likely (unless it were an SSD, of course). Thus, getting all the performance you can out of your disk strategy would be a very good idea.
Personally, I'd be very tempted to install Linux and Windows on the first drive, with a large data partition as well as swap and Windows virtual memory on the second--and, quite possibly, the Linux home directory as well. The basics of the Linux root structure, minus the home directory, can often fit into a five or ten GB partition fairly comfortably. This may be a somewhat more radical setup than you are prepared for or comfortable with, however. In many cases, people don't want to run the risk of trashing an XP install by monkeying with its formatting in the off chance that something could go wrong.
That said, you can also move the XP install to the second position easily enough if that is what you want to do. GRUB will see it in either event when it is installed and configured, and will divert the boot sequence there when you want to start Windows.
Thus, you have many choices.
David
--- In LINUX_Newbies@yahoogroups.com, Joan Leach <jleach728@...> wrote:
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> Will Mint 10 Gnome see the WinXPpro Sp3, now on first position on the IDE cable, and boot WinXP after I switch the cable to make WinXP the second position? Both are set to cable select, both are WD 40GB IDE hard drives. I ask because I see no easy way to dual-boot with Linux being on the second hard drive, that is to install it there.
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> I usually swap drives, cables, or the setting in the BIOS, but this is for someone that usually dual-booted, but never did the install himself.
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> Google search has me lost...
> Joan in Reno
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> [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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