compounded problems

B

Bobo

banned
I have been having some problems with my hard drive lately (the recycler disappeared with 5GB of crap and the disk is full) so I decided to reformat it and have a dual-boot system with windows and linux. I just need to know how to do this.

Right now I am running Windows XP Home with SP2. I have want to have Linux Fedora but I don't know which to download from here. Once I have Fedora on CDs along with the rest of yhe info on my hd on CDs or DVDs, I will reformat the 2 partitions of my hdd.

But first a few questions:
  1. Do I need to use CDs to be able to boot off of something? Or can I use DVDs? (because they hold a lot more) I have a CD/DVD writer
  2. What do I burn to the Windows CD/DVD? I do not have a disk because this was a preloaded system.
  3. Can I use my XP Upgrade disk in any way? This was a disk my dad bought back in '02 to upgrade
  4. Do I install Linux first or Windows first?
  5. Do Linux and Windows need to be on separate partitions?
  6. Can Linux run all the same programs that Windows can?
  7. Is there a better (free) version of Linux that I should be downloading?
  8. Is there any way to format the Windows partition without booting DOS?
Thank you for your help.

Tim
 
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actually I decided to get another hard drive, so I will not need to burn the data to CDs/DVDs. Will I then be able to transfer the system files to the new hdd and just boot? Or will there be something else that I need to do?
 
and one more thing...what program should I use to partition my hard drive? Every free program I have tried has not worked....:mad:
 
set it up as slave drive and then format with your old drive to boot then restart and use some ghost program to mirror the drive and change the new drive as boot drive.
 
kof2000 said:
and use some ghost program to mirror the drive
Click to expand...
what program should I use?
and change the new drive as boot drive.
Click to expand...
How? If I just change the new disk as the boot drive, why do I need to ghost the disk? Can't I just copy all the system files? Or is it jsut basically the same thing?

I know I am asking a lot of questions and probably annoying you, but I am trying to learn and set up my computer so that it will work properly, so please bear with me.:cool:
 
and one more thing...what program should I use to partition my hard drive? Every free program I have tried has not worked....:mad:
Click to expand...
The one that comes with Fedora or use the XP disk if you plan on partitioning it NTFS.
 
I need to know how to install it first...:rolleyes:
Click to expand...
If you don't know how to install Fedora you shouldn't be trying to use it. Get Mandriva or some other automative linux distro and use that.
 
Lord AnthraX said:
If you don't know how to install Fedora you shouldn't be trying to use it. Get Mandriva or some other automative linux distro and use that.
Click to expand...
I mean how to format the hard drive and get windows running again...

The reason I chose Fedora is because it is free...I really know nothing about the differences in Linux, I have only ever used Redhat
 
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