Multibooting Linux/Windows

Okay well ive been thinking of doing this for quite a while. I recently tried SLAX linux, i know its a watered down version of linux but i love it and it basically pushed me further into deciding to multiboot both windows and linux on my system.

But i would like to know will doing this affect Windows in anyway? Also i only have one harddrive, should i get another one seperatly for linux? Last of all i would like to know what version of Linux all you people think i should Install,,

Thankz for the help EvilApproaches

okay as for multi-booting.. u can do it 1 of 2 ways.

1. Split up ur hardrive to have a couple gigs for windows and a couple gigs for linux, and installing linux on the seperated half. then have a menu set up on boot up.

2. Install linux on a 2nd hardrive and then have a meu setup on boot up.

yah i was kinda thinking the first way, split my harddrive,, how could i do this?

youre gonna need a partion maker such as PartionMagic. I think you now were to get it;);)

There are also native built in commands to (re)partition your HDD, most notably fdisk.

I've always fancied a dualboot O/S with Ubuntu Linux And Windows XP

i would advise you to use two harddrives, just incase anything goes wrong, windows will be untouched on the other harddrive. Also when windows buggers up linux will be safe and you wont have to risk lossing it.

yah i was thinking i might have to buy an extra harddrive which i wanted to avoid :/. time for me to find a way to earn some cash.

You also want to bear in mind that Linux often has difficulties in reading NTFS formatted drives - so if you want to have data accessible for both OSs you'll need to have a seperate partition/drive formatted in FAT32…

This is the only reason I haven't switched to dual boot as I've got a lot of data I'd need to access on both and FAT32 sucks.

There is something you can download for that now to have minimum write options as long as the data remains the same size and length(Read it in linux magazine very handy article on knoppix(My laptop buggered up while i was away and i had a knoppix live cd so.. yeah))

scyth3 wrote: You also want to bear in mind that Linux often has difficulties in reading NTFS formatted drives - so if you want to have data accessible for both OSs you'll need to have a seperate partition/drive formatted in FAT32…

This is the only reason I haven't switched to dual boot as I've got a lot of data I'd need to access on both and FAT32 sucks.

Linux can read NTFS absolutely fine. There is also a driver that can let you write to ntfs but its not fully finished and most of the functions are in alpha. - http://www.linux-ntfs.org/

also if you want to access your linux partitions from windows you can get programs to do it. Seeing as i use reiserfs i use a two programs called 'rfstool' and 'rfsgui'. I know that you can get programs that read ext2fs/ext3fs as well.

Also i have a fat32 partition were i keep files a always access from both and it works absolutely fine.

Yeah, I do the same this as SF only with out the whole FAT32 partition

I dual boot with 2 hdds and it works perfectally only rather than messin with a Boot loader i just use my BIOS to boot off of the different hdds.

Yeah;

I have SuSe 10.0 and Win XP MCE 05 on my pc and xp on laptop. Dual booting is fine. May I suggest only 20 gb's of HD space for linux b/c it has alot of small programs and you can get used to it more and not loose alot of data you have already. =P If you need partitionmagic I have a copy; pm me.

SwiftNomad

LOL @ above sig "ip user" snigger

Just boot a distros install cd and run cfdisk to split your drive just keep in mind its best to have a setperate partion for /, /boot, /usr, maybe even /home and /var too

Well I have Ubuntu system, I dual booted by using this tutorial http://wiki.ubuntu.com/WindowsDualBootHowTo

Hope this Helps, I don't know much about linux but i think this is what you are looking for.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6104490811311898236&q

I run Dual boot, SuSE Pro 9.3 and Windows XP Pro.

What you do is you set up an NTFS drive of say 25% of your drive space (depending on size of drive, I suggest 16-20GB) for your Windows Boot Partition. Set Up a Drive of similar size for your Linux Boot Partition (seperated into /, /boot, /var, /root and so on.) This will give you about 50% left that you set up to be a FAT32 (Yes it does suck but so does Windows and not sharing the NTFS Code) and use that for files and what have you.

Remember INSTALL WINDOWS FIRST!!!