[ILUG] Re: Red Hat, Debian, ...

[Alan Mac Hugh]

An other way to dual boot, is  get partition magic by power quest( i got my
version about 3 years ago it was about  70 euro then). The great thing about
this is that includes in it is boot magic, so if you mess
up installing Linux, pop the CD select boot magic, and you can set to it
only to boot either your windows or linux  partition, it  basicly takes over
the job of the MBR.


On 11/25/06, Gavin McCullagh <gmccullagh at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> On Tue, 21 Nov 2006, DDowney wrote:
>
> > Many thanks for your email. It gave me a lot to follow up on.
> >
> > Firstly I took you address from the ILUG website, hope you dont mind.
>
> Seriously, you should be emailing these questions to ILUG.  Not me.  The
> point of community mailing lists is that everyone benefits from
> them.  When
> you email me personally you're the only one who can ever get any benefit
> from it.  That's leaving aside the possibility that I might give you a
> wrong answer and nobody else would be able to point it out.
>
> > Two quick questions while I have you, will the partitioner know to
> divide
> > the disk on the free space on my HD (though Ill have everything backed
> up
> > just in case. But Im thinking of important sys files, etc).
>
> - Defragment the drive, calculate how much space is being used,
> - Boot ubuntu cd and in the manual partitioner choose to resize the ntfs
>    partition (to something larger than the space used).
> - When that's done you can create other partitions in the available space
>    you have made.
>
> I can't guarantee you it will work flawlessly, but it has for me in the
> past.  If it was known to overwrite files and bust winxp, people wouldn't
> use it and ubuntu wouldn't have it on their cd.
>
> If you feel nervous, boot the linux cd, just do the partition resize
> (applying the changes), then quit the installation and you should be able
> to boot WinXP with the smaller partition and verify it works.  Then you
> can
> start the installation up from scratch with the resizing already done.
>
> > Secondly, if WinXP is by default on an NTFS partition, as I was informed
> > on the ILUG forum, how can I go about setting up a FAT32 partition to
> > swap files between OS's in. Would  a partitioner do the job?
>
> The partitioner will create/modify the partition table, allocating sectors
> of the disk for separate filesystems.  You create a partition (preferably
> immediately adjacent to the NTFS one) labelled for use by a FAT32
> filesystem. Then you'll need to format it from windows (or possibly from
> linux I suppose using mtools or something similar). Windows should detect
> it and give it a new drive letter.
>
> Gavin
>
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