Dual Boot

[soccerdude]

Hi guys,

I would like to dual boot Windows Xp and Linux Freespire. How would you do this because I have no idea how?


Thanks

 

[PC eye]

First you have to get used to Linux before tempering with the XP mbr. Do you have GParted in order to shrink the XP primary down? If you have a spare drive onhand you may find it easier that way since it won't effect your primary OS. If you make the usual goofs of a Linux newbie XP will still be intact.

GParted can be downloaded directly if the distro lacks drive tools from http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=115843&package_id=173828

This can be used to creeate both MS and Linux VFat type partitions as well as others. But you will need cfdisk or another tool in order to format the Linux partition(s) you create with it. Instailling a Grub or Lilo boot loader into the XP mbr would be the next step after creating the root partition for that distro for installing the main files onto.

There are different tutorials for installing Grub available for review. Being another Linux impaired user I usually go through everything seen at a distro's main site when deciding on it. http://wiki.freespire.org/index.php/Main_Page Looks like you found one with a good support for WMP and mp3 files as well as other media types. For coaching you through to see a good setup tlarkin would be the one to have here however. You will want to get familiar with Bash commands as well. Using a console for things is quite common with any distro.

 

[tlarkin]

Hi guys,

I would like to dual boot Windows Xp and Linux Freespire. How would you do this because I have no idea how?


Thanks

Do you currently have XP already installed? If so, the Linux isntaller should recognize your current XP NTFS partition. The installer will allow you to resize the partition and allocate a set amount of space for the Linux install. Now, there are several schemes you can partake when setting this up. Typically you will want to set up two Linux partitions. 1) make the size of about double your ram. So, if you have 1 gig of RAM make a 2gig partition. Partition that one as a swap parittion. 2) Use the remaining space as your file system partition for Linux. You will probably want to use ext3 as your file system but have many different options.

Then at one point during the installation process, it should detect that you have two OSes installed, and it should configure either LILO or GRUB so you can multi boot. Freespire seems to be Debian based, so setting up the GRUB menu later on won't be too hard if something goes awry.

Make sure to back up any data before trying this, just incase.

 

[PC eye]

The last distro actually setup for dual booting here was a Red Hat distro not one of the newer ones like the Debian there. Here I'll be trying to work with Vista as well as XP with Mandriva and Solaris 10 as the mix. The GParted live for cd 0.3.3.0 release was the latest that was found being platform independent. If the drive tools are not included there you would need that for shrinking the XP primary. But you still want to follow tlarkin's advice on backing things up in case of any mishaps?