I want to make the move to linux so that I can get more work done and frankly not be distracted by crap. I recently bought a nice amd 64 and would like to unilize the most out of my new machine, and I also aquired a new hard drive 80GB and a copy of gentoo. my problem/question is how do I set this up? I do not want to or dare touch the current partitioning of my hd (master). it is my main stuff for windows XP, and after the problem I had with moving it to a new comp I don't want to have problems arise. Is there a way to like lets say have an A disk and have a prompt ask me which OS to load? I currently have 2, 120GB hd's the new 80GB (currently untouched) and the "main" windows XP hd, will I have problems reading anything off those drives or are they better left untouched when accessing the opposite operating system? I.E. all of the drives minus the 80GB are windows NTSF drives, the other one will be whatever linux does to it. any help or suggestions would be highly appreciated. I was even thinking of taking the easy way out and just putting the 80GB in a seperate box and have it's own dedicated system but then I wouldn't get a chance to utilize the cool 64bit's or the tons of memory and graphics that I have my comp for. Thanks a ton. (and if you even reccomend a better distro let me know)

Okay. Well.

It's easy enough to get linux to dualboot. Almost every distribution is designed for it.

I reccommend Ubuntu, which is about as good as a linux distribution gets by my criteria.

For booting it's pretty easy to set it up to do whatever you want, so you can have a menu that shows up for a second before going with the default of windows, or whatever.

Linux can read NTFS, but not write to it for all praactical purposes.

Is that all you asked?

Quote: Original post by Chalma
my problem/question is how do I set this up? I do not want to or dare touch the current partitioning of my hd (master). it is my main stuff for windows XP, and after the problem I had with moving it to a new comp I don't want to have problems arise. Is there a way to like lets say have an A disk and have a prompt ask me which OS to load?

That's what LILO and GRUB do. Most distros will set these up automatically for you. Normally, your Master Boot Record for you master hard drive will tell the computer to load up Windows XP. LILO/GRUB will instead pop-up a menu which let you choose which OS to run.

Quote:
I currently have 2, 120GB hd's the new 80GB (currently
untouched) and the "main" windows XP hd, will I have problems reading anything off those drives or are they better left untouched when accessing the opposite operating system?

You can read NTFS from Linux but can't write to it. You can read and write in FAT32 though, so if you create a FAT32 partition you can use that to share data between the two.

Quote:
(and if you even reccomend a better distro let me know)

I'd recommend something like Suse, Mandrake or Fedora Core. These all have graphic installers, will automatically detect/setup your hardware, have good package management (easy to add/remove software), have GUI configuration tools and will generally boot you into a usuable system within 30 minutes without you having to read a manual. For example, your graphics, network and sound will all be working, you'll have loads of useful software installed and you can access your Windows partitions from the start.

If you really don't want to be distracted by setting stuff up yourself, I'd really recommend the so-called 'easier' distros. Gentoo takes a lot of time and effort to get your system fully set up and in the end you won't have gained much except in understanding how to manually build your system (which distros now do automatically for you anyway).

Good luck! :)

That post was mine ^ :)

On partitions: As was previously stated, Linux can read NTFS partitions with no trouble at all, but write support is so limited that it might as well not exist at all (don't use it). Linux can use a number of different filesystems (ext2, ext3, and ReiserFS, to name some of the most common ones). What many dual booters do (myself included) is to create a FAT32 partition for sharing files between operating systems—Linux can read and write FAT32 without any problems whatsoever, but it is not recommended to install Linux on a FAT32 partition. The FAT32 filesystem lacks many important features.

On Gentoo: I'm a great Gentoo fan, myself (and am presently running Gentoo on an AMD64), but I would not necessarily recommend it to an absolute newcomer to the Linux world. I would recommend going with one of the more accessible distros mentioned above—at least for now.

Gentoo is a great developer's distribution, but probably a bit too involved for someone who's just starting out. I've heard good things about Ubuntu, and it looks like its a 64 bit version ready to go.

I'd be prepared to try a few out before you settle on one.

For the booting, if you can tell your bios which disk to boot from, then install a bootloader (grub or lilo) on your new drive without touching the old one at all. Otherwise you can install it on your main drive, as all it does is write a tiny bit of code to the boot sector, which can be easily undone from the winxp recovery console.

As for filesystems, I havnt gotten around to trying this yet, but if you install iTunes for windows it gives windows the ability to read and write HFS+ disks, and newer linuxes should have native support for this as well, so you might want to look into that for say a separate 20-30gb partition that both os's can read/write. Otherwise your only other choice is FAT32, which, quite frankly, is crap.

For other distro choices, I belive fedora is about to release a new version, and debian is also well regarded, being the father of ubuntu. Suse 64 bit is another good choice.

cheers,
-oddbot

Quote: would like to make transition to linux SLOWLY

You should probably start playing with a LiveCD distribution like Knoppix (though Gentoo has a Live CD too, and you say you already have it...), so that you know what to expect.

Quote: Is there a way to like lets say have an A disk and have a prompt ask me which OS to load?

A floppy? Yes, but that's probably more hassle than it is worth.
Here's what *I* have done. You say you bought a new hard-drive. Perfect. You are going to use it as your new master hd, and let the WinXP drive be the slave.

The BIOS will look on the master drive for a bootloader. During your Gentoo (or other distribution) install, you will put GRUB on that hard drive (I like it better than LILO).

Then, in your GRUB config file (/boot/grub/grub.conf), you will add an entry for it to boot windows :

title           Windows XProotnoverify    (hd1,0)map             (hd1) (hd0)map             (hd0) (hd1)makeactivechainloader     (hd1)+1

Those commands are explained in the GRUB manual, but basically what it does is to fool the computer (map) into thinking that your slave HD is the master HD (so that your windows drive is still C:/ even though you swapped it), make the first partition on there the active partition (rootnoverify, makeactive), i.e. the one that gets booted up, and pass control to the bootloader that's on the MBR of that disk (chainloader).

At that point, the normal windows boot process starts, with windows thinking that everything is the same as before.

All the work is done on your new HD, you don't have to touch the windows one at all - except for switching it to slave status.

Quote: ll of the drives minus the 80GB are windows NTSF drives, the other one will be whatever linux does to it. any help or suggestions would be highly appreciated.

As C-Junkie said, Linux reads NTFS just fine, but can't really write to it. If you want a shared data area that's writable by both, you'll either want to use FAT32, or install an ext2 driver on the Windows side (it says it's alpha, caveat programmor - more results).

I second the liveCD, though it may be a pain to maintain persistence across sessions.
Another suggestion, though, is to try out any distro with a virtul machine program. The two I know about are Microsoft's VirtualPC and VMWare Workstation. It will run quite a lot slower than a real installation, and you won't have direct hardware support (at least I haven't seen any in VPC), but you won't have to touch your hard drive, either. Plus you can "backup" the current state of a machine, that way if you really screw up the linux OS, you can just go back to when it last worked.

Regards,
jflanglois

[edit] Didn't know about the Windows EXT2 driver, pretty cool...

Cygwin is a great way to get used to GNU and other 'linux' software before you format your harddrive only to find out that you don't have a clue how to do stuff using the shell :)

I absolutly loved fruny's suggestion. I did a little search on GRUB and I needed to know a few more things

1) I came up with (ignoring my other drives for now) singling down to 2 hard drives I need my WINDOWS XP HD and my new harddrive. I will make a half partition for the new hard-drive, one being linux and the other fat32 (file-sharing). using grub I have the following code

default=0 //want this to be loading windows as defaulttimeout=30 //allow 30 seconds before it picks the defaulttitle Windows XP //windows XP settingrootnoverify (hd1,0) //its a slave hd on the second IDE chainmap (hd1)(hd0) //make the hd1 act as hd0map (hd0)(hd1)//so windows doesn't freak out make hd0 as hd1make activechainloader (hd1)+1title Linux //my linux partitionroot noverify(hd0,0) //hide(hd1,0) //I don't want to mess with windows hd at ALLkernal //havn't decided on that yetboot

basically the linux hd will be the 1st (MASTER) on the ide and will have the bootload up and have the menu and I pick which OS I want.

2)do I need a linux swap partion? if I do do I need to partition my hd 3 times?(once for linux, one for fat32, other for linux swap?)

3)lets say I pick some mom-and-pop distro as my linux and I decide that sucks, I want something else to be the linux, what exactly is changing? do I have to mess with the MBR again? how do I change the grub settings without actually reinstalling a distro?

4)can I continue leaving the linux portion of the startup code blank until I decide on a linux OS to install?

5)if I totally screw this up can I get my original settings back.

thanks for everyone's (incredibly fast) and great responeses, if this stuff turns out to be semi-easy I will probably try many distros and definately learn alot ('specially about MBR's and loading)

PS if you know a good linux, totally for dummies link send it my way. I did a google and they want me to compile things or change settings and frankly the code is stuff I don't recognize for my compiler to do or they want me to change a bunch of settings and run off into linux commands that I don't know how to do much less execute. Thanks A TON, again