Dual Boot System

Is a dual boot system safe? I am currently running Window XP, and am thinking about downloading RedHat Linux. Is this smart to do? I have 320 megs ram, AMD duron 701 mhz processor. And is the downloadable version of Red Hat good?

XP is so new, I haven't heard if there are
any unique problems dual booting it with
linux.
I wouldn't be surprised if eventually Microsoft
tried to sabotage attempts to dual boot.
Most likely, the issues with dual booting XP
will be analogous with NT or 2000p.
A little more tricky than 9x but feasible.
:cool:

Just for you, bubba, I went ahead and tried to install my RH 7.2 on my box with XP, and it worked just fine. Partitioning went smoothly, and I had no problems. If this is your first time messing with partitions of harddrives, you may want to read up on it a bit. And although RH 7.2 supports a lot of hardware, you may want to get most of the specifics of your hardware before you install it to make sure that you can manually install the stuff if it does not detect it.

I agree.......I installed XP first....then redhat on my laptop and everything works beautifully except the built in modem......and there are no drivers for linux for a winmodem with the kernel I have.....
but that is my problem not yours.

Im building a website on geocities and it says that many people who visit my site use Windows NT 5.1. I know that NT 5.0 is windows 2000, but is 5.1 windows xp?

How do I partition my drive? And when I do, how much space will I need one the second partition?

There are many different ways of partitioning your HDD man. You need to do a search on google for more detailed info, because there is a good bit of stuff you need to know about this. It's unhealthy to go into *nix blindly.

With Mandrake 8 you can resize existing partitions without destroying the data on them, and you'll need to roughly split the disk in half, half for windows then in the other half:

Label Size Type
------- ----- ------
/boot 20MB EXT2 Linux Native
<swap> 2x RAM* Linux Swap
/ All remaining space EXT2 Linux Native


* For your swap partition, you should use at least double the amount of physical system RAM.

I have about 15 gigs a of harddrive total. Is that enough for both OS's? You may have found out already, but this is the first time I have ever tried anything like this.

15 GB total is 7.5 GB each, I had both running on an 8.4 GB hard disk (total size) which was 4.2 GB each (unformatted, that is... formatting loses a bit of space) but yeat 15GB is enough to put 2 OS's on.