Folllow up to my Disk Druid Question, or "comedy of errors"

[gaf at blu.org (Jerry Feldman)]

On Thu, 8 Apr 2004 10:08:36 -0400
"Alaric" <Alaric at angeldustrial.com> wrote:

> 
> 
> Yup, hi sorry about that, when I bought the laptop is had XP install
> on the whole drive and I only wanted to resize it and install Fedora
> on the other half of the drive. I'll give it another go in a few days
> when I have a bit more free time and see if I can't get better
> results! :) try try again as they say!
I did not have time to respond. I (abnd other BLU volunteers) have a lot
of experience installing Linux on PCs that have Windows (9x, NT or XP)
installed. I used to use Partition Magic to resize Windows, but now I
use qtparted. The procedure I use is to simply shrink Windows, then
reboot to make sure we did no damage. At this point, there will be one
or two Windows primary partitions. I sometimes allocate and extended
partition, but I do not create the Linux partitions at this point. 
The next step is to run the Linux installer for the appropriate release.
Disk Druid (Red Hat, Fedora) or YaST (SuSE) or DiskDrake (Mandrake) will
detect the Windows partition and allow you to install in the free area.
I prefer installing Linux in an extended partition. This allows you to
allocate as many Linux partitions as you want. (I personally prefer 
root, swap, home, and /usr/local file systems). 


Another issue is that during install, you are given the option to
install the boot loader (GRUB or LILO). These install into the Master
Boot Record and can easily be configured to boot Windows. If you think
the MBR is damaged, you can boot Windows rescue diskette, run the fdisk
command with the /mbr option. The following Linux command will also
clear the Master Boot Record:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=512 count=1


-- 
Jerry Feldman <gaf at blu.org>
Boston Linux and Unix user group
http://www.blu.org PGP key id:C5061EA9
PGP Key fingerprint:053C 73EC 3AC1 5C44 3E14 9245 FB00 3ED5 C506 1EA9
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