help/advice needed on bring AMD box with no system to life


I run XP on many boxes.

My thought was a dual boot on the new AMD box

the old XP box had two hard drives.

Can I "move/copy" the "C" drive off the one drive that will be removed and onto the other drive that is staying, so that after removal of the original C drive the machine will boot to XP with just the remaining drive?

I have the linux iso for 64 bit on a DVD. Can I install from the DVD?

If I bring up XP on the AMD first, can I install linux over it - or is it best to put XP on one drive, then do a dual boot install of the Linux?

Do I install the windows software on Linux and again on XP? How? Do I run Wine in some way in doing the install of the win software on Linux? Or does Linux just need a single install on the Windows software on a FAT XP drive so as to access the windows software with Wine?

XP has acted wierd in the past when a hard drive with XP is moved to a new CPU motherboard machine. Is this still true - do I need to reinstall everything again including the XP OS after the hard drive with XP OS is moved to the new AMD machine?

You have a lot of questions in there and I think you are confused about a few things.

Windows and Linux have to be on seperate partitions, I think you got that. seperate hard drives is nice, but not needed. What you do is install Windows first (don't have to first, but it works better in the end), making sure to leave space for Linux. Then you install linux, from the DVD if you have it (make sure you are burning the image, not just placing it on the DVD).

As for WINE, this is the deal with WINE, it blows. First, you can not just run the windows programs off the windows drive, they need to be specially installed to run from WINE. But the other things is, you don't really need WINE, any program you could need (with the exception of games) has a good linux counterpart. Programs like Firefox and Thunderbird have linux versions. Other programs have counterparts that serve the same purpose. AIM has GAIM. Office has OpenOffice, Winamp has XMMS, Media Player has Xine and well MP. Long story short, you shouldn't need WINE for anything really.

As for reinstalling Windows for the move, unless all the hardware is the same you are probably going to run into some issues, so its just best to reinstall Windows fresh on the new box.

Any other questions or things you aren't clear on?

You dont HAVE to run wine programs off of a "fake" window drive - I can successfully run Rollercoaster tycooon and a large amount of coffeecup software from my normal windows installation. But wine isnt finished yet, so probably isnt an option in most cases.

D