[novice1583]

hi.i have windows xp with ntfs format.i want to install linux on my computer by dual booting.can i do it.if ican ,how? please help me.

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I'm dual booting fedora and xp. it's alot easier if you have a second hard drive installed. My primary is xp and slave is fedora. If you do it that way just download the iso's for linux and burn them as an image onto a cd. Then reboot with the cd it will walk you through in the install. Mine is set to have boot loader on my primary drive with an option to select which os at startup. Default is windows so if i don't select anything xp will load. The linux forums have a lot of help on dual-booting on one drive, which is more complicated because you ahve to do specific petitions. But just to let you know before you can see your windows drive content in linux, you have to mount the drive and that can be more complicated if your using ntfs.

[churchskiz]

I'm dual booting fedora and xp. it's alot easier if you have a second hard drive installed. My primary is xp and slave is fedora. If you do it that way just download the iso's for linux and burn them as an image onto a cd. Then reboot with the cd it will walk you through in the install. Mine is set to have boot loader on my primary drive with an option to select which os at startup. Default is windows so if i don't select anything xp will load. The linux forums have a lot of help on dual-booting on one drive, which is more complicated because you ahve to do specific petitions. But just to let you know before you can see your windows drive content in linux, you have to mount the drive and that can be more complicated if your using ntfs.

[novice1583]

I have fedora core 3 and red hat 8 with me right now .so,which one would u recommend? even if i have to install one of them ,how am i supposed to do that on one hard disk as idont have an extra hard drive.am i supposed to use partition magic or something.please explain me in detail.

[BobWerner]

Yes, you can use Partition Magic to setup the Linux partition. Just make sure you have PLENTY of hard drive space available. I'd also make a ghost image of my hard drive and store it somewhere. That way if it 'splodes you'll be able to recover.

After using PM just load your favorite flavor of linux and let it do the work. Lilo will let you dual boot. Some people use other boot managers.

There's several good resources on the web for this and google is your friend.

[mrsocks]

i am looking to install SuSe on my Windows XP also.

it is a completely new machine.
120 gb hd that i made an 80gb particion in the bginning to install XP on. That is formatted ntfs.

the other 40 gb is unformatted.

when in startup with the SuSe cd in the drive, XP always starts up and it doesnt appear that the suse installer is catching.


Am i doing something wrong? I have installed RedHat on a win2k machine and Suse on a XP machine, both dual boot fine, but I cannot figure out why this is not going right into a setup to install linux.

Do i need to format the final 40gb of unformatted rive before i can install linux?
do i need partition magic just for that?


Any suggestions?

thanks.

[mpfeif101]

mrsocks...

Do you have your bios set correctly to load from CD first instead of hard drive?

[\\`ired]

If you can't seem to figure out how to dual boot another viable option would be something such as a virtual workstation such as VMWare. This allows you to install a guest operating system inside the system thats already running. This way both can run at once. Not recommended for people with less than 512mb ram, or under a 1.5ghz processor. They tend to run really slow under those specifications.

[taureanblack]

I'm wondering if it's possible to dual boot with Linux residing on an external drive?

[Damien Kane]

I dont know about dual booting with Linux on an external drive, but you can boot from the CD/DVD into a LiveCD environment. Takes a few minutes longer - depends why you need it external, I suppose.

[breathe easy]

If you can't seem to figure out how to dual boot another viable option would be something such as a virtual workstation such as VMWare. This allows you to install a guest operating system inside the system thats already running. This way both can run at once. Not recommended for people with less than 512mb ram, or under a 1.5ghz processor. They tend to run really slow under those specifications.

alrite geeks i need help. first timer on here myself. thing is i have the VM ware. but i dont have a cd burner. i would like to install ubuntu.i have downloaded the iso and can mount with nero image drive. but since its a live cd (which involves a reboot) how do i get it to work without having to buy a burner.
plz help out.
no black mails(my sisters are finished)...lol

[dsenette]

you can mount an ISO image in the cdrom of the VMware appliance....i believe when you configure a new machine...you can edit the properties of the cdrom drive to point to a specific CD drive on your machine (which could point to the "virtual drive" that nero creates) or you can directly mount an ISO image as if it were a CD in the CD drive of the VMware machine

[breathe easy]

u r a life saver. thanx a million boss. will work on it tonite and post u a reply early in the morn.. got a few things i gotta finish at the mo.

[PsychPosse]

On my Vista laptop I have the option to boot into Vista or openSUSE.
I had some issues at first since linux took over the MBR and I couldn't boot into Vista. But I got it figured out with some help from a good group of guys at a Linux Specific FORUM.
Not to chase you away from the good help here, but you might also find some valuable resources there.

[silverbeard]

I'm wondering if it's possible to dual boot with Linux residing on an external drive?

If your mainboard supports booting from an external you don't need to dual boot. Mount a bootable image (install) to the External Drive and it will boot when the drive is plugged into the PC and you start the PC. Several distros offer the option to install to external devices and the forums for the distro usually have information on how to set it up.

[cable89]

yes you can u can try boot i got pc linux ubuntu and xp but u have to mess with the kernal and stuff but its easy