h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Put it simply - is it possible? I have xp on one HD, and would like to use a spare for Linux.

Yes it is.

I dual boot with winxp & a bsd

You will need to clear a partition on your hard drive. The quick way would be to use some sort of partition manager but there is always the hard (free) way which is using the "fdisk" command in a dos box. In my case I needed niether as when I got this PC new the first thing I did was to reinstall XP, which I did but using only half the hard drive

You will also need a boot manager but these days most versions of linux & bsd come with a boot manager so that should not be an issue.

good luck

just read you will be using a seperate HD so ignore the comments on partitioning

If the Linux you want to install has a graphical installer, it's very likely to offer you an easy-to-use 'select the hard drive on which to install' widget.

Failing that, you can use a LiveCD Linux (eg http://www.knoppix.com or http://www.mepis.org ) to partition and/or install the operating system on the second hard drive. Note that with any LiveCD, you have the advantage of being able to try out Linux *whilst it installs*, especially with something like MEPIS, which compresses a couple of Gigabytes of software onto the CD.

One more thing, what File Systems can Linux use? Does it use common ones like NTFS, FAT or Fat 32 (or 16)? Or does it use its own?

It uses its own.

Different filesystems have different uses, and many 'manual install' Linux distros like Gentoo, LFS, maybe Debian, and the BSDs I think, will allow you to choose your own filesystems (you can have as many as you want, in different partitions of course).

A hassle-free Linux distro installation, like Mandriva or MEPIS will choose a standard install, which is usually along the lines of:

/, the root partition, Ext3 filesystem
swapfs for the Swap partition and
/home, your user files, in another Ext3 partition.

Other filesystems it can use include Ext2, ReiserFS, XFS, JFS et al.

That doesn't mean to say it doesn't support NTFS and FAT32. It can still read and write to these partitions, of course.

Great. Thanks all!