Dual booting Windows and Linux

From: Damien Hull <dhull@digitaloverload.net>
Date: Mon Apr 23 2007 - 10:52:54 AKDT

WARNING! THE FOLLOWING INSTRUCTIONS COULD CAUSE DATA LOSS AND OR LEAVE
YOUR SYSTEM UNABLE TO BOOT. BACKUP YOUR DATA BEFORE YOU MESS WITH YOUR
FILE SYSTEM. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.

It seams people are having trouble dual booting Windows and Linux from
the same hard drive. Here's my 2 cents. I'm sure there are other ways o
doing it.

The best way to do it is install Windows on part of the drive and Linux
on the rest. However, this won't work if you have a restore CD. The
restore CD doesn't let you change the size of the partitions.

Here's what I did on my IBM ThinkPad T42 (Laptop)

   1. Reinstalled Windows XP using the restore CD set ( had linux on the
      laptop )
   2. Ran defrag (recommend you do this)
   3. Booted the Ubuntu CD and stated the install
   4. Used the Ubuntu installer to create the partitions
         1. Figured how much space I needed for Linux and Windows
         2. Shrank the Windows partition
         3. Put Ubntu on part of the free space
               1. /
               2. swap
               3. etc...
         4. Created a small Fat32 partition for sharing data between
            Windows and Ubuntu

The system boots fine and I've never had any problems. I didn't use
"ntfsresize". I shrank the Windows partition using the partition tool in
the Ubuntu installer.

NOTE
Make sure you know how much space you need for each OS and your data. If
you miss calculate and find you don't have enough space you will have to
reinstall everything. As far as I can tell there is no way to make an
NTFS file system bigger. I'm not about to trust my data to "ntfsresize".
Not yet anyway.

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Received on Mon Apr 23 10:53:13 2007

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