How to create Dual boot XP Pro and Linux

[Roger Redford]

Hi all,

Thanks for your responses. I've been doing some other reading,
and I'm still wondering about a few things.

Currently, I have:

disk 1 60 gigs
C: 60 gigs

disk 2 120 gigs
F: 90 gigs
G: 30 gigs (used as a backup drive for data on C


From what I'm gathering, I will have to make at least 3 partitions
for Linux. swap, boot, and root. Maybe some more.

If I partition up F:,
- what will XP see? F:? anything else?
- will XP still see what is currently G:? So that I can use it
for a backup?

Thanks a lot

 

[Bit Twister]

Hi all,

Thanks for your responses. I've been doing some other reading,
and I'm still wondering about a few things.

Currently, I have:

disk 1 60 gigs
C: 60 gigs

disk 2 120 gigs
F: 90 gigs
G: 30 gigs (used as a backup drive for data on C


From what I'm gathering, I will have to make at least 3 partitions
for Linux. swap, boot, and root. Maybe some more.

If I partition up F:,
- what will XP see? F:? anything else?

If you shrink F:, create partitions, XP will see F:, unknown partitions and G:
If you delete F:, create partitions, XP will see unknown partitions
and G: will become F:

 

[Joe]

You shouldn't actually need a boot partition, I think. Earlier versions
of the lilo boot manager needed the boot files to be in the first 1024
drive cylinders, but this was fixed long ago. It is possible there is an
analogous limit today, much larger than 1024, but I think you'd have to
dig around in the source code to find out. There's just been a new
version of lilo released, and I'm sure that can deal with boot files
anywhere on a current drive.

If you shrink F:, create partitions, XP will see F:, unknown partitions and G:
If you delete F:, create partitions, XP will see unknown partitions
and G: will become F:

XP, *finally*, can be told what letters to use for which partitions, so
if you need to delete F: and still keep the other as G:, you can. The XP
disc manager is willing to at least display non-Microsoft partitions,
but as 'unknown' types. Windows versions earlier than 2000 were aware of
non-MS entries in the partition table but pretended they weren't there.

 

[Roger Redford]

Here is what I did.

On XP, I used DISKPART, in a Dos window to partition.

I reconfigured everything on the secondary disk. The
first primary partition was for BACKUP of XP data (and later linux).
There was one extended partition, and within that, all
the partitions that Linux would need.

The hard part was predetermining how much space to allocate.
Eventually, I used:

/boot 100 MB
/home 5 gigs
/usr 2 gigs
/var 3 gigs
/tmp 2 gigs
swap 2 gigs
/opt 4 gigs

/ all the rest

Then, when installing Linux, I just chose the partitions
that I used. It worked well. I decided not to include the
XP backup partition at this point.

I installed directly from CD. Config BIOS to look for CD
before the hard drive, and reboot.

I used Lilo for the dual boot. Windows first. It works well.

I'm used to unix commands, but always in a telnet window. The
Gnome, and KDE guis are requiring a fair amount of time
to learn to navigate, and see what's there.

I hope this helps anyone else out.

Good luck.