Windows XP Dual Boot XP-Pro & Linux

[Anon_F]

Is it possible to Dual Boot XP Pro & Linux?
XP already on my Laptop and thought of running Linux as well?
Whats the best way to go about it?

 

[floppybootstomp]

a) Yes it is
b) Well, why not, good idea
c) Depends on the distro

I haven't done a dual boot for some time now but I believe most modern distros will set up a dual boot almost automatically, giving you a set of prompts to follow.

About the most user-friendly Distro right now is PC Linux OS 2007, has lots of codecs installed some others don't include. It initially installs as a Live CD as well so you can have a play with it before you load it to hard disk.

Suse 10.3 has just been released, very smooth OS but a bit bloated and you have to download stuff to enable music and movie playback.

Whatever you do, be very very careful when setting up and read everything very carefully before making a decision, cos that's the master boot record you be messin' with there.

It is probably easier if you can partition your hard disk prior to installation but most distros will let you create a partition on install.

Or you could load a Linux Distro to a seperate hard disk.

But whatever you do both OS's will be sharing the mbr so I'll repeat the part about being very careful during setup.

PS: Tell you what, I have a copy of XP set up on a hard disk atm that I was thinking of reinstalling, I'll try a dual boot with that and let you know how I get on.

But I ain't gonna do that right now, fings to do

 

[Anon_F]

Cheers for that.

Off myself to test some homebrew.

 

[psd99]

This will be a good one to look out for.

I have been thinking of doing this dual booting for a while.
With the option of two different xp versions.
But that is easy.

 

[psd99]

Ah got me thinking is it possible to put XP on those new imacs?
the ones that are only a screen with everything inside it! :_)

 

[Me__2001]

Ah got me thinking is it possible to put XP on those new imacs?
the ones that are only a screen with everything inside it! :_)

yes it is, either using paralells or boot camp

 

[psd99]

are they names of softwares?

 

[floppybootstomp]

are they names of softwares?

I was wondering that meself.....

 

[Me__2001]

are they names of softwares?

yeah, parallels is a virtualization program which means you can run XP and OSX at the same time, its quite cool to have a windows app running in the OS X window

Boot camp lets you install XP to the HD like you normally would for a dual boot system

 

[psd99]

nice one!

 

[floppybootstomp]

Just tried installing PC Linux OS 2007 alongside a version of XP on a 20Gb Disk. XP only has Office 2003 and a few other apps on it, it's taking up 5Gb, which leaves up to 14Gb for Linux.

However, when I reached the formatting options, I was informed there is not enough free space to 'auto-allocate' and I'm blowed if I could see any other options.

I did have the option earlier in the setup to 'allocate all space not taken by Windows' but I wanted to divide the Disk down the middle, 9.5Gb for each OS.

I could have cheated and used Partition Magic 8 prior to installation but I wanted to see how PCLOS2007 handled it.

So, I've now whacked in an 80Gb disk and am currently installing XP. Once that's done, I'll see how we get on with installing PCLOS2007. That's actually the only current Distro I have atm, I may download Suse 10.3 later.

 

[psd99]

tell me more about all these booting up options you get.

like when you start up you get that black screen to give u an option to either boot up into windows or linux
does all that happen automatically?

I presume this is what you are trying to find out flopps

 

[muckshifter]

don't Vista run more games than Linux ?

 

[floppybootstomp]

don't Vista run more games than Linux ?

Not neccessarily..... but..... Vista will run games that are a lot better than games that will run on Linux.

Assuming Vista can get the X-Fi sound card to run correctly that is

Ok, I now got a dual boot system.

It's odd, Linux starts with sound and connected to the Internet straight out of the box whereas Win XP doesn't.

I had made a mistake and I probably can get a dual boot from the 20Gb disk. A very simple thing, when I was presented with the formatting window during loading Linux, it said 'click on the partition' which I didn't suss previously but is actually a blue bar right in the middle of the window. Doh.

When you do that, you get a slider to set the size of your Linux partition which will hold your root, memory and swap sections for Linux. I went for 50/50 or more accurately, 40Gb & 40Gb

Then you press 'auto-allocate' follow the prompts and Linux installs. I chose GRUB as boot loader and set the menu delay time to 15 seconds.

And now when this machine boots I get a choice to select between Windows and PC Linux OS 2007.

Some years ago I actually had Win 2K; Win 98; Red Hat and Mandrake on a boot menu, Mucks might remember those shenanigans, I only had dialup at the time and he sent me the Mandrake CD's.

But I've never really stuck with Linux tbh, I didn't have the patience. But I may just find the patience now

All in all, the whole installation was dead simple, you'd have to almost go out of your way to mess it up.

I did take a few pix of some of the loading screens, if they're any good I'll post a few in this thread later.

 

[floppybootstomp]

There's a few pix in this thread, they're not good quality, I'm going to have to get another lens for my Nikon, the 18-135 just won't focus down far enough to get a close shot that's in focus.

With that disclaimer/excuse out the way, here's how the dual boot installation went.

Win XP loaded onto an 80Gb HDD.

Brief specs:

Aopen MX46 Motherboard
Celeron Sckt 478 1.7Ghz CPU
1 Gb DDR PC3200 RAM
80Gb HDD
2 x 20Gb HDD's
D-Link LAN Card
Creative Audigy 2 Sound card
Asus DVDRW
A Floppy Drive
Nvidia 6800 256Mb AGP Graphics card
Jeantech 350W PSU

Set the machine to boot from CD in Bios, boot from PC Linux OS 2007 CD;

During load of Live system choose keyboard; Time Zone, Network and Internet settings - mine was auto-detected as Ethernet, I just clicked on all the defaults and it connected to the Net straight away.

Play about with the OS if you so wish

Double click on desktop installation Icon, wait for installation to start.

Choose between Normal (IDE/SATA) hard Disk or external (USB) hard Disk.

Choice for formatting:

a) Erase and use entire disk
b) Use Free Space on Windows disk
c) Custom Disk partitioning

I chose Custom, clicked on the partition, shown in this pic as a blue bar:

Set a slider to give half the hard disk to Linux. Clicked on 'auto-allocate' and the proposed setup was shown, thus:

Accepted proposed setup and waited whilst the disk section was formatted and Linux was loaded to it.

It came to a window asking which boot loader you wanted to use. In my experience GRUB is best, that was the default so I left it at that. I also set the time the load menu was displayed on startup from the default 10 seconds to 15 seconds.

Bootloader choice screen:

Then when the system re-booted I was presented with this menu screen:

And that's about it really, both systems load fine

 

[psd99]

lovely so it is not that hard then!

 

[Abarbarian]

Thanks for that Flopps . Easy to follow and very informative .