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I don't know if anyone can help; me or not. But here goes: I have a 2 TB hard drive (I think it's a Western Digital, and I'd like to add another hard drive, either traditional HDD or SSD, whichever takes the least energy to run and have Linux Mint installed on that. I have Windows 7 64 bit installed, but I do not want to wipe Windows at all. I just want to dual boot, but with separate disks. The problem is, I don't know if the 320w psu will allow me to do that. I've heard that hard drives don't take all that much room but is that actually feasible?  Will the power supply support another hard drive(I'd consider an SSD, and in fact, I'd like one) either hard drive or SSD so that I could install Linux on the new one, and keep Windows on the main hard drive, or would I be better off dual booting off the same disk. I've heard a lot of scare stories and a lot of stories where it went fine.  I also know I can’t upgrade to a stronger power supply with this computer.

I don't have UEFI, at least it doesn't show EFI or UEFI in the Disk Management utility in Windows, so I assume that means it’s legacy bios. Is it even possible to dual boot with 2 drives with what I have, a DVD-R optical drive, 2 TB HDD, 8 GB RAM and Intel Core 2 Duo at 3 GHz. If I’d be better off dual booting on the same disk I do have an 878 GB partition that doesn’t have anything on it. But is it safe? It seems to be split between it’s OK, and absolutely, do not do it. You can “brick yourself out” of both OS if something goes wrong, whatever that means. Frankly, this has me running scared, so if I can, I’d prefer to have the Windows and Linux on separate disks.

My computer specs are as follows: Computer: HP Compaq 6000 Pro Microtower CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 @ 3.00GHz Memory: 8 GB DDR3 Video: Integrated Video Audio: Integrated Audio Storage: 1. WDC WD2002FYPS-01U1B1 ATA Device-2 TB-Western Digital (SATA 2 I think) 2. Seagate External (USB) Hard Drive (My Windows files are all redirected to our external drive)]] Optical Drive: hp DVD-RAM GH60L ATA Device (it’s SATA as far as I know) Operating System; Windows 7 Professional. I haven’t gotten a Hard Drive yet. I was planning to get one during this coming holiday season, but wanted to wait to see if it would actually be feasible first, and also that’s when our Christmas bonus usually comes in, then have it installed. I’m just starting to learn about computer hardware and eventually building a computer, but I’m by no means there yet, so I’m planning to have someone install it for us and install Linux Mint on that drive. I think they call it an OEM install. I’d appreciate any help I could get or advice, if if I can use another hard drive, should it be traditional or SSD? Thank you for your time. Sincerely yours, Katherine Logan

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  • Can you elaborate on the USB hard drive? Is it USB powered or does it have its own power adapter? Is it USB 2.0 or 3.0? What is its capacity, how is it partitioned, and how much space is still free on it? What do you use that for (you redirect your Windows files there, but the exact usage isn't clear)? Could you put Linux on that drive? If you add another internal drive, would you still need the USB drive? Would you consider dual booting with Linux on the USB drive (even USB 2.0 would perform close to an internal drive, and you could add Linux without affecting your internal drive at all)?
    – fixer1234
    Commented Mar 30, 2019 at 4:08
  • It has its own power adapter. It's not partitioned other than NTFS. I had Windows "Move" the libraries to the Seagate after putting a folder both the both of us(there's just two of us with the standard Documents, Music, Pictures, Videos as well as Downloads. I didn't even know I could partition an external drive let alone know how. I';m more than a little nervous about risking files we spent over a decade saving.
    – Maghdalena
    Commented Apr 1, 2019 at 3:54

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From a power POV this is fine. Your CPU has a 65 watt TDP and it looks like you dont have an external graphics card. The original system were specced with 240 watt CPUs and the ability to take 16 gigs of RAM. A typical hard drive only requires 10 watts, and a SATA SSD about 5 watts, so you are well within power budget.

Where you might have an issue is physical space and possibly SATA connectors - open the CC to see if you have a place and available SATA interfaces on the motherboard. (Also see if you have any free power cables or if you will need to pick up a power splitter).

Couple of thoughts -

SSDs are often smaller then HDDs and way faster/more relIiable. Assuming disk space is not an issue, go with an SSD.

If you dont use the DVD, you can get a faceplate and mounting bracket (or jerry rig something) and replace it with a hdd/ssd. (You can even get low profile dvd drives and other bits which will allow you to add an hdd and dvd well, but I think thats a waste if money on a system this old.)

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  • Thanks. I'd have someone probably install it for us, though I like the idea of the SSD. I'd be willing to get a smaller one for Linux OS, and use the extra partition we have for the home, assuming we have room. And the smaller size is good too. I'm not at the point of actually opening up the case yet or even what I'm looking at or for as far as space. I was going to outsource that. I could call the guy that we outsource our computer to; he might know more about that than we would. Again, thanks.
    – Maghdalena
    Commented Apr 1, 2019 at 4:01
  • You should be aware that that system is about 8 years old and if you need to actually pay someone to upgrade it, the cost of their labour (in a 1st world country) is likely more then the value of the system. I would generally recommend.my customers against payong for my time to do this.
    – davidgo
    Commented Apr 1, 2019 at 4:29
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Davidgo has looked at the specs and concluded that your computer could handle installing another drive. I'll trust that he's right. However, you may not need to do it, and may be able to save some money on a new drive.

If the USB drive has at least roughly 30 GB of free space, you can add Mint to it and not affect your system drive. 15-20 GB is generally plenty for system and software files, 15 GB is a fair amount of space for routine files in your Home directory (your own files), unless you maintain libraries of files. If you carve out 8-16 GB for a swap partition on one of the drives, Linux will have some operating headroom. The same way you offload files in Windows, you could use the free partition on your system drive to warehouse big file collections if there's limited free space on the USB drive.

Windows 7 and BIOS suggests that your USB ports might be USB 2.0. USB 2.0 hard drives don't use the fastest available drives internally, but USB performance won't be noticeably worse than installing the same drive internally (you can get faster hard drives whose peak performance internally would be a little better, or an SSD that would be substantially faster). But with 8 GB of RAM, much of what you do is likely to be RAM-based. An internal SSD would boot faster and save some seconds when opening software, but most of your operating time running from a USB hard drive won't be very different from operating from an internal drive. If your computer has USB 3.0 ports and the external drive is USB 3.0, there wouldn't be any performance difference compared to installing the drive internally.

If you want to go that route, backup the files on the external drive just in case. You can copy the files from the USB drive to the free partition on the system drive. Windows has tools to shrink the partition on the USB drive. You might want to defragment it first, including free space, to minimize the portion of the drive containing files. An alternative would be to verify that everything was copied to the system drive, then just repartition the USB drive as desired, and copy the files back to the NTFS partition.

After you shrink the partition, create partitions for Mint in the unallocated space. You can simply add up to three more primary partitions (e.g., root, home, and swap). If you want more than four total partitions, create an extended partition and then you can add as many logical partitions as you need.

When you install Mint, protect your system drive by not using the automated partitioning wizard. Do it manually so you can ensure that everything goes on the USB drive, including GRUB. If you want 100% insurance, disconnect your system drive while you're installing Mint. In that case, though, the GRUB installation won't detect Windows and include it in the boot menu, which would allow you to always boot from the USB drive regardless of which OS you want. But you could modify GRUB later to have it find and add Windows, or you can pick your boot device when you power up.

BTW, if you want Windows and Mint to be able to share stored files, you can simplify things by keeping shared-access files in partitions other than your core Mint partitions. You can load drivers to allow Windows to work with some of the ext formats that are typically the default for Linux, but ext4 is generally preferred for Linux and I don't think that is effectively supported in Windows (ext2 and ext3 support is pretty good). For simple file access, Linux can handle NTFS without a problem, but I wouldn't try to use NTFS for Mint's Home directory.

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