What to do with a "spare" 120GB drive?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Alright, so I was having some computer problems and decided that, if my current drive(s) turned out to be hosed, I could at least move the data to a new drive and re-install WinXP. Following my normal mantra of “upgrade, upgrade, upgrade!” I bought a 120GB drive to replace my 80GB. As soon as I brought the new drive home, however, I figured out how to fix the problem. So I have a perfectly functional system right now, and I happen to have a 120GB drive just sitting around. This cannot last.

My current drive is actually a pair of 40GB drives striped together as an 80GB RAID, so I was thinking I’d partition a chunk of my 120GB drive to serve as backup space. Then I thought of using a 4GB partition exclusively for my WinXP pagefile. Or a small partition to run Linux (and deal with using a bootloader… argh!). Or break it into three 40GB partitions and mirror my RAID onto 80GB (speed and redundancy), and have 40GB left to “play” with.

Of course, as soon as I use FDISK on it and start making partitions, I’m pretty much locked into a course of action, so I wanted to get some advice from the peanut gallery. What say you, Dopers?

2

Make a music jukebox out of your XBox.

3

Awesome Idea. My buddy has a 120GB hard drive in his Xbox. He has dozens and dozens of games stored, and tons of movies!!! That thing rocks!

4

I like the install Linux on it - I use Mandrake, and the boot-loader wasn’t any problem at all.

Or put in in a Xbox, and install Linux on the Xbox. :wink:

5

I was going to suggest the relatively mundane, keep it and use it as a backup drive to, well, back up your files.

6

Buy an external USB 2.0 drive chassis and use the drive as a portable external drive. They come in handy for moving big stuff around or making backups. Make sure it’s a USB 2.0 chassis not a USB 1.1.

Like these drive cases- near bottom of list

7

Firstly, putting the swapfile (‘virtual memory’) onto a less-used physical drive gives noticeable performance gains.

Secondly, I agree in trying out Linux on it. You shouldn’t need more than 5-10GB for a hefty linux install, but also make a large partition formatted as FAT32 (make it 32GB, the largest FAT32 can manage), which is the only one which allows seamless data use in both windows and linux. Thirdly, beware that Mandrake 10 has problems installing over the Windows XP boot - to the point you have to reinstall XP. Try Suse or something else instead. Fourthly, get downloading!! :smiley:

8

I installed Mandrake 10 community edition(I will get around to installing the Official version in a bit) a couple months ago, and it had no problems existing side by side with Windows. You may be thinking of Fedora 2, which did have a bug preventing booting into Windows.

9

Definitely Mandrake 10 CE. It trashed the XP portion of the FAT. And I’ve found others online with the same problem.

10

Give it to me.