Installing Red Hat Linux 7.3 for dual boot on an XP box

I'm running an XP box with two harddrives a C drive with 16 gigs and a D drive with 60 gigs. Both the of drives use the NTFS file system.

Both of the drives are used by xp only.

I have 7 gigs of free space left on the C drive. The C drive is my drive with the windows directory so I guess it is the primary drive, I want to install Linux on these 7 gigs and let Linux use these 7 gigs.

I know I have to make a partion out of those 7 gigs with Partion Magic. I have Partion Magic 8.0. Anyone know how to make a partion that linux can use out of those 7 gigs on my c drive?

Also, I want to use the grub loader cause I heard it was the easiest to use. Will I have any problems with grub? How do I use grub?

Is this all that I do:

1. make a partion out of those 7 gigs with partion magic
2. install redhat 7.3 and choose during the installation to install linux on that partion
3. Choose the grub loader
4. reboot, and I can pic if I wanna boot into windows or linux?

Is that it? Do I have to do anything else to make this work? No problems.

My other drive (d drive) will still be for xp only and the rest of the c drive will be for xp only?

Thanks

I dont know if this is any help!! But...

http://www.antionline.com/showthread...ight=Dual+Boot

http://www.antionline.com/showthread...ight=Dual+Boot

Thats just some help!! there are a lot more threads about this!!! And with "GOOGLE" i figured out how to DUAL BOOT



TASH :hearts:

I have searched...I'm just trying to sum up what i've gathered and get it confirmed before i try this...

what you said solid prez, will work im sure. unless you have that partition slaved... i would recommend using one harddrive for windows, and one for linux. just my opinion.

First of all....you need to create 2 partitions to run Linux... one with ext3 or ext2 file system (thats the best for Linux) and other that will be the swap partition...(my swap partition have 500M=256M of RAM*2)
This swap partition is the virtual memory of Linux.

Then when you start to install Linux it will ask you on what partition you want to install so dont worry...

after that it will ask what boot loader you will choose (grub or lilo)...

After installing Linux...every time you reboot your box will appear Grub loader for you choose what OS to boot..

"My other drive (d drive) will still be for xp only and the rest of the c drive will be for xp only?"

yes the drive D will still for xp but drive C (hda1) will be for Linux..

Great replies,

Er0k- How can I tell if my drives are slaves or or not?

neowarez- All of my c drive will be for linux? I wanted to install just just on those three partions I made from the 7 gigs.......Could this work?

The reason I want to do this is because I'm afraid my c drive is a slave for xp. The c drive holds all the windows files etc. If I could put all those files on the d drive and tell xp to look there when booting then I'd love to give the whole drive to linux (after formatting it). Is this possible?

"All of my c drive will be for linux?" --> No..you can take 6.5G of that drive for Linux (/) and the others 500M for swap.

So your hard drive will have 4 partitons:

One with NTFS for WIN XP
other with ext3 or ext2 for /
other for swap
and finally other with NTFS


Note that windows do not detect Linux partition but linux detect the others partitions if you want.

Also someone said I should install the grub bootloader on the first sector of the first partion instead of the mbr. Should I do this?

SolidPrez >> whenever your computer boots, your bios does a POST, A Power On Self Test, it shows you your harddrive status, your memory status etc, you can just check there. Plus you can choose to use LILO or GRUB. I use LILO, but whatever floats your boat.

Erok do you recommend installing the bootloader on the mbr? and also, what's the difference between lilo and grub?