I''m going to be building a new system (for the first time) next week when my parts arrive. I know that the college I''m going to works with linux as the operating system so I''d like to have both operating systems on the machine I''m building. Does anyone know a link to a good (recent) tutorial on how to install both operating systems? Thanks.

There''s not much to it really. Create a partion that''s about half of your drive and use it to install Windows.

If you''re using Win2k or WinXP I recommend using FAT32 for you Windows partition. That way you can read and write to it from Linux. If you use NTFS for your Windows partition you won''t be able to write to it.

After you get Windows working, install Linux on the rest of the drive. You''ll end up with three partitions on the drive since Linux likes a swap partition. At boot time you''ll pick what OS you want using either GRUB or LILO.

My current setup is a 30GB hard drive with Win2k on a 15GB partition and RedHat 9 on the rest of the drive with about 500MB for swap.

by "both" operating systems I''m assuming you''re referring to Windows as being your other OS...

Any given Linux and/or BSD (which I recommend) package will include partitioning software. Install your *nix and during the partitioning leave some space for Windows. When you install Windows, use that space.

Most *nix packages come with the instructions for this and include a boot loader (for selecting with operating system you want want to load when you turn your box on).

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Woohoo a less than jake fan! Some distros like Red Hat and Mandrake make dual booting really easy. Others, like Slackware force you to config lots of stuff. Really my only advice is install windows first becasue if you install windows after linux, your gonna have a really hard time trying to get linux to boot.

[edited by - Pezcore on June 7, 2003 5:30:20 PM]

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Original post by Pezcore
Woohoo a less than jake fan! Some distros like Red Hat and Mandrake make dual booting really easy. Others, like Slackware force you to config lots of stuff. Really my only advice is install windows first becasue if you install windows after linux, your gonna have a really hard time trying to get linux to boot.

[edited by - Pezcore on June 7, 2003 5:30:20 PM]

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I second the install windows first recomendation. It will generaly install over you boot loader and if you lack a boot disk you are going to have a hell of a time getting into Linux after the install. Windows asumes it will be the only kid on the playground where as Linux knows windows could very well be around. The only real hard part on istalling both would be getting the HD partitoned correctly. You will need to do that before you do anything. Most Linux distros provide easy ways of doing this durring installation but if you install windows fist as recomened then you need to slap fdisk onto something bootable and run it.

I do not suggest partitioning the drive in two equal pieces.
Obviously, you will use one OS more than the other, so I suggest letting more space for the Windows partition, because you might want to put movies, etc. on it. And windows has a better movie support than Linux does.

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Ok, so I''m building my new system w/o a floppy drive since...who really uses them any more? So I should burn fdisk onto a cd.
Then do this:

1) put all the parts of my computer together
2) turn on, configure bios
3) turn off, insert cd with fdisk
4) load, run fdisk, tell it I want 3 drives, C with 60gig, E with 19.5gig and F with 500mb.
5) reboot, format c: /s, format e:, format f:
6) install windows on C
7) ???????????

NAh,

3) insert windows install disk
4) install windows leaving good sized chunk unused at the end of the drive
5) insert linux disk
6) install linux using that chunk.

You might even want to consider doing something like this in step 4:

30gig windows XP/2k NTFS
30gig windows FAT32
20gig unused space

if you can. then use the FAT32 space for for your data files. So you can easily access all your files between the two OS''s...

If it won''t let you, and you want to... leave 50gig unused and then format things correctly later

Would I install linux on the "20gig unused space?"
And I could access files on the FAT32 from both windows and linux?

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Original post by LessThanJoe
Would I install linux on the "20gig unused space?"

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Yes.

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And I could access files on the FAT32 from both windows and linux?

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Yes.