2 OSs on 2 HDDs?

[Morfik]

How do I go about doing the following?

I am currently on a 20 Gig Maxtor IDE hard drive (XP Pro). I have recently purchased an 80 Gb Seagate SATA HDD.

What I want to do is install Linux on the 20Gig IDE hard drive and XP Pro on the 80Gig SATA HDD, both running on the same machine (not at the same time obviously).

I want to have an option to boot off of either HDD on start-up. My MoBo is the MSI K8T Neo.

Is this possible? And if yes how do I do it?

 

[xSauronx]

i think if you install windows first on the 80g, then linux on the 20g you can setup lilo to boot from the primary drives boot sector to give you a choice when you boot up as to which OS youd like to boot into

of course, i dont know how to setup lilo....i would think some newer distros would do it for you easily. mandrake does it without any real intervention required from you during its install but the only other distros ive tried personally were debian and gentoo and i did them by themselves on a spare box

 

[Morfik]

what's a good "distribution" for me to download?

I program and play with Java and C++, but have never worked with Linux.

There are so many distributions and I found it hard to find a resource with guides on which distros are good for who and for what purposes...

Thanx for the reply by the way.

 

[aZhE]

redhat is a good beginner distro with everything you will need.