A few things i learnt on my first dual boot

Ok this is my very first tutorial i have resently spent time dual booting my system with Suse 7.3 linux and Windows Me. This is a few things i learnt not really a tutorial in the pure sence of the word just things i picked up on the way though my first time that might help anyone thinking of doing for there first time. Any comments greatly welcomed.

So you there about to start on dual booting your system. Your reasons may be many, mine where simply i want to learn linux but also wish to use windows because i know it well im comfortable with it, in time i will go over to linux fully, but not until i know it inside out and back to front.

I liked this site on dual booting i suggest going have a read.
http://www.zdnet.com/products/storie...643483,00.html

Secondly before you thik about going though with this go to this side and download fips 2.0
http://www.igd.fhg.de/~aschaefe/fips/

Fips is a great litte program i suggest you read the docs on the site as well before you start but though of you whom cant be bothered heres a short run down of what you need to do, if you do this, then its up to you I take no libility for your action apon my adivse what so ever.

On your system great a bootable floppy coppy the FIPS files RESTORRB.EXE, FIPS.EXE and ERRORS.TXT. Once you have done this then you need to cheak it works, cheak you can boot form the floppy and are able to gain access to your hard drive. Once you have created this disk you need to creat a back up of the rootboot.00?, the ? can be a number form 1-9. FIPS will let you do this, Right you have this prepared this is so short an overview that i strongly suggest you read the documentaion within the site i gave earler.

So you got you bootable floppy with FIPS files on it and the backup of rootboot its time to start. Install linux however you wish follow the doucmentaion on the site you downloaded it or in my case in the box it came in, hopefully no porblems will have occured and you have done it.

One problem I had with my copy of suse 7.3 was it kept hanging during the instaltiong when i was using YAST2. This was simply corrected by using the safe instalatoin setting. Most distro have touble shooting sites or documation you can get you hand on for installation so im not going to go though a large range here and this is not what this tut is about.

For some reson you wish to remove linux from you system. Going ito DOS and use fdisk/mbr.

Happy you removed linux you turn on you computer to find that your window partion is still the same size as it was after you installed linux. How to recover this space is where our fips disk comes in, boot up using the fips disk then use the RESTORRB.EXE, replacing the rootboot form the backup you did before you intall linux and your lost space back to you.

So there you go a litte bit from me with a few things i had to do with my first time, a few probs i came up agaist and the soultion i used, there may be better ways than this i dont know, this is how i did it, and perhaps it might help. Any comments on this or mistakes i have made please tell me.

Always looking to learn,
Kindred69

I would like to take a minute to HEARTILY endorse a boot-chooser, XOSL. You can install it to an ALREADY-EXISTING FAT partition, and it will take over the boot-choosing process. It comes with a semi-integrated partition manager as well, and has a GUI, can be set to restrict booting by password, and can boot to Disk, any Partition, CD-Rom, etc. I have yet to have problems with it. It also doesn't look ugly.

i am a newbie too but it is a good idea to defrag your hard drive before using fips i have recently read a couple of stories in a magazine that if you dont it can write over some existing data on the drive which could be critical if that data is important to you.

anyway the post was a good read i have just installed redhat 6.0 along side win 2000 and i have a internal modem so i have just found out that most linux operating systems dont like internal modems if you have any ideas pm me

Hey kindred69,
Very nice tutorial, but you were one week too late, I just installed redhat7.2 by repartitioning my hard drive to keep win98 on my box. I had to do it the hard way, trial and error. But your tutorial looks very nice, same thing I would tell someone looking for help.