Dual Booting Win9x & BSD/Linux

I am new to security and the workings of the different flavors of Unix. However I want to play with them a little at home and still be able to use what I have now. Is there a way to dual boot Win98 and some form of Unix? I asked one of the guys I work with and he says the best way to do that is get another harddrive and just disable or enable one or the other as primary when I want to utilize it. He has Linux dual booted on his machine at work and said it was a bear. Not something that I should spend the next 3 months of my life trying to figure out just yet. Any ideas on some way I would be able to have access to both OS' at the same time at home? Buying a new box is outta the question, unfortunately. Or, if dual booting can be done in an easy way...anyone know of any good tutorials out there?

Your co worker is right, get a 2nd harddrive for Linux. You can offcourse partition it with Powerquest partition magic but I won't recommend it.
Getting a 2nd harddrive has many advantages.

if your current system in Win98 then you should have minimal problems (it get harder with Win2K or NT due to the NTloader), with 98, make space (un-partitioned) for the *nix partitions and boot from the CD from any recent distro and follow the instructions, you could use the FAT32 partition for some distro's but I personally prefer to keep things seperate.

The distro should give you the option to install a bootloader (lilo or grub), choose lilo, make sure you create a bootdisk(!) and use lilo to choose which OS you want to boot.

You could skip the bootloader bit and just rely on a bottable floppy for *nix and remove it when you feel the need for the joys of Win98.

Although this is primarily relevant for *nix I don't think BSD should be much different, just remember the Golden Rule... Make a Boot Floppy during installation!

Hope this helps,

:cool:

J.

Well troy you can do what I did,

Its quite easy, What i got is a 40 Gigs HDD I put a 6 Gb Win98 partition , then use PQmagic 5 to resize my win partitionto 3.5 GB since I dont use much of it, Then format the newly freed up space by dividing it into 2 partitions, use say 2 Gb as ext2 linux Partition , remainingsay 200 or some megs for linux SWAP,

well then I installed Win2k on my logical drive but U can skip this part and load any decent Linux distribution It will install lilo which will give you the option at booting whether to continue loading Windows or go with Linux

Thats it PQmagic is cool. Maybe my mathod wont be approved but my Pc's running well past 1 year or so without any problems with 3 OS 's

There's a great book I recommend:

The MULTI-BOOT Configuration Handbook

Check out the link
:cool:

thanks for all the great advice....i think imma go lock myself away for a while and see what i can come up with. rcgreen....that looks like an excellent book. I just ordered it. Thanks again....

Here a post about my first time dual booting there are a few links on it, a sie on dual booting and one an Fips. I dual booted Suse 7.3 and windows ME on 40 gig hard drive.Its just a few problems I had with the soultions I used. Hope it helps.

Kindred69

I've been told that system booting utilities usually do a pretty good job of keeping things on the up and up (Boot Magic, System Commander etc.), especially when *nix OS's are involved. I'm actually engaged in an Ebay auction for a copy of Partition/Sys commander , as I also want to set up my PC for multi booting (98, 2K, Redhat) I've also heard that certain versions of Linux are less problematic with multi booting than others, so It could pay to do a little research as well.

ppl, this is discussed before at http://www.antionline.com/showthread...ight=Dual+boot
look at that thread

me being basically uneducated on how to do any of this, I have a question as to the information I am getting. Why does one person say to put Lilo in the MBR and the next person will say it will never work like that? Is it a hit or miss thing or are there just so many different ways of doing this?

There are just so many different ways of doing this...

You can for instance use a bootfloppy disk to boot your Linux instead of using a boot loader in the MBR with linux item.
Or you can boot into your linux using the NT loader (you need to place the lilo in the 1 first sector of your boot partition (eg: the superblock) and not in the MBR to do that, placing lilo in the MBR will overwrite your NT loader)
Or you can boot into your Win98 / NT / DOS using a linuxloader like LILO
Or you can use a third party boot loader...

you see, many ways to accomplish the same...

that's pretty much what I am getting out of this. I guess it's just a trial and error thing, right?I would ask what everyone thinks is the best way, but I know I would be right back at square one with different opinions. The help is greatly appreciated. I have a lot more options than I did when I started, which is what I was looking for. Thanks all.