Dual Boot Linux and Windows XP

[Trunks]

Hey

My sistuation is as follows, I currently have an 80 gig hard drive with widnows xp installed on it, there is one partition 80 gigs. To keep it short I want to put Ferdora Core 2 on it because thats what we are using in school and to make homework easier I'd rather be at home. I also would prefer not to reinstall windows.

Is there anyway I can make a partition on my allready partitioned drive install linux on the partition and have my currently existing windows xp stay on like 70 gigs of the drive and have linux on 10 gigs

[silenze]

In that situation I usually use partition magic to free up the first 8gb or so on the drive then use linux fdisk to setup the linux partitions/format them during setup.. (resize the ntfs parititon and move it up 8gb, so the first 8gb are free..)

[jester]

Try vmware. You wont have to install linux on your pc & youll be able to use linux while your booted up in windows.

[silenze]

Try vmware. You wont have to install linux on your pc & youll be able to use linux while your booted up in windows.

One word, ew.

[Trunks]

lol silenze

[jester]

ew maybe right but it serves the purpose & thats the only way linux gets on my machine.

[silenze]

Not jester-bashing;

If you want to Learn and Use linux.. don't run it in VMWare... If you're intimidated by it, or scared you'll screw something up... or just want the familiar Winblowz interface right there to comfort you, yeah, use VMWare.

It is my opinion that running linux in VMWare is Not a good way to learn it, but I've only been using it for 6 or 7 years so what do I know. :lol:

[techniq]

In that situation I usually use partition magic to free up the first 8gb or so on the drive then use linux fdisk to setup the linux partitions/format them during setup.. (resize the ntfs parititon and move it up 8gb, so the first 8gb are free..)


A small note, alot of distros (Suse and Mandrake I know of for sure as I've used their tools to do so) have a built in partition resizer during install which resize NTFS and FAT.

I actually have used the Suse one a few times... last time was about a week ago when I got my laptop back after getting repaired. Resized the 60g NTFS down to 20G and put Suse 9.2 on it.

As with any partition resizer, including partition magic if you go that route, I recommend always having a good data backup before hand, as nothing is 100% ;).

*Note: The NTFS Suse 9.2 resize I did took less than a minute during install. The installer will look at your drive/partitions and usually make a pretty good suggetion (Resize this, create this, etc). You will need a swap partiton (which the installer will recommend a setting for) as Linux uses a partition and not a file like Windows.