Dual Booting

I have Windows XP installed on my P4 machine. I want to install Linux Red Hat 9 on the same hard drive without deleting any of my files on C:. So if I install Red Hat 9 on the same hard drive will my files on C: be deleted (NTFS)??? If not can I partition my hard drive during the Red Hat installation to install it there???
Or do any of you know of a good tutorial that explains how to do this good? thank you...

I googled it but couldn't find any good in depth tutorials.

Will partitioning with partition magic delete any of my current files???

Get partition magic
set your partitions BEFORE you add another [any] OS

I'm not certain if it makes any difference which order you load them [windoze requires that you load the oldest first, ie: you could always upgrade easily, but it became awkward if you wanted to ad W98 to a W2K box]

Quick look, and I didn't see any other OS's mentioned, only M$ ...........
just check first.

Hey,

A lot of us dual boot all kinds of combos. Before you do, clean all the old garbage out like temp files, temp internet files, might run your anti-spyware programs and so forth, as well. I always like to defrag windows prior to partitioning.

For Partitioning, I've used Partition Magic, Fdisk, those Apps that come with the Linux Distros as well, and others, but if you're not accustomed to doing it, Partition Magic is a good choice.
However, if I remember right, Red Hat 9 will do everything for you and even polish your shoes.

Cheers

edit: There's some good tuts in AO on dual-booting, installing Linux etc., and you will also need to consider a boot loader. Red Hat will offer up a choice of two during the install and they have worked well in the past.

Will partioning with Partition Magic 8 delete any of my current windows files??

No. Partition Magic can move and resize partitions without deleting any files. Of course, deleting a partition is whole different matter. As far as resizing, just don't resize your Windows partition to be less than the current space you're using on it (I hope you know that already). I don't think Partition Magic will lwt you do that anyway. As relyt said though, make sure you defragment the drive before you do any repartitioning It makes a big difference.

And when partitioning, don't forget to add a swap partition, about 1 and a half times the size of your memory. Linux always uses a swap partition rather than a swap file.

OK i made a new partition (fat 32) of 10Gigs for the Linux installation. During the linux installation i selected the partition I made and it said the installation could not continue, must set /root or something like that, can someone tell me what that means??

Well first off the linux partition should be of a linux filesystem, ie ext2 or ext3.

For the root partition, you need to tell it which partition will be at the root of the filesystem. This will be the partition you have selected as your linux partition. It asks this because you could choose to mount, say, your log directory on another partition if you wanted to.

So you should just need to figure out the device name for the linux partition and tell it which one that is when it asks.

Remove your "new" fat32 partition then start the linux install again. During installation it'll create the correct partitiontype for you...

OK sirdice, but if i do that will that delete any of my current windows files which i would like to keep?