Will Red Hat 9 allow me to allocate memory for a dual OS (Windows and Red Hat) or do I have to invest money on a third party software like PartitionMagic? I remember installing mandrake and it came with the capacity to allocate memory for dual OS. I''m thinking about installing Red Hat in my window 2K computer and I don''t want it to be erased.

RedHat has Disk Druid which will let you setup your partitions. I don''t know if it will let you resize your Windows partition without losing everything on it though.

I usually use fdisk from DOS to setup partitions, but that destroys what was on them. There is a free DOS utility that will let you resize your partitions without losing data on them. It''s called Ranish Partition Manager, and you can download it here. You''ll probably have to put it on a boot disk and run it from DOS.

FIPS is a linux utility to resize drive partitions. There are a few others, but don''t recall off the top of my head.

Interim

I don''t believe FIPS works with NTFS, which is probably what your using with win2k. What I''ve been doing is using Bootitng to resize partitions since the partitioning part of it is free (I''ve used it 3 times with no problems). But I''ve been using a several month old download, but I doubt that they have removed the partitioning part of it.

Note: You should make backups of anything important just in case.

Simply download it, run it to make a boot disk (you''ll have to run it on windows), then boot with the disk. DON''T install the boot manager (that''s the first question it asks with my version when it boots), go to the partition tools (or what ever it calls it), resize the windows partition down to make room. I also slide the partition over 100 megs so the /boot partition can be at the very beginning (may not be necessary anymore but better safe than sorry). After it''s done, reboot windows should boot normally (just to make sure it''s still happy and that the partition is smaller now). Now boot the redhat cds, install what ever you want, when it asks about partitioning, do it MANUALLY since automatic will delete windows. It may complain about drive geometry but you can ignore that since it doesn''t bother grub or lilo. Now put /boot in the 100 meg hole at the beginning of the drive, and configure the rest how ever you want (a swap partition which is twice your amount of ram and giving the rest to / is sufficient). Sometime during the install it''ll ask about which OS to default too (DOS is the windows partition) and choose which ever you want. And assuming I explained this right you should be all set.