Dual Boot laptop

[skiflyer]

I have a WinXP Laptop with NTFS, and a long time ago I set it up dual boot with RedHat (7.1 I think it was), but have since completely redone the box, and am back to a single NTFS partition.

I'm contemplating a dual boot yet again, but don't want to go through my partition magic pain again unless necessary... and I'm always up for playing with new distros... does anyone have any suggestions on a distro which can handle XP like this?

Thanks,

Rob

 

[AP81]

It's hard to dual boot in the situation without resizing your NTFS partition. You would have to resize it and create some free space fo another setup. If it was FAT32, there are distros that can be installed in the same partition as windows.

The only options you have are:

a) Install VMware and run Linux through that
b) Convert your NTFS partition to FAT32 and install a distro such as dragon Linux
c) Resize your NTFS partition and create free space
d) Remove all partitions and start over
e) Use a live distribution which runs off a CD, such as Knoppix

If it were me, I'd opt for C or D. It is a good idea to always keep a free partition or free space, as you don't know what you will do.

 

[jdmuskrat]

i use win2k ntfs partition and Suse8.2pro on my toshiba 1805. i split the drive using partition magic and had no porblems. i like the suse 8.2 because it found all the hardware with no problems except the stupid winmodem. other lin distro's would not fully detect the embedded hardware.

 

[ladato]

Can I just suggest, before diving into dual-boot, that you check out Knoppix? (

http://www.knoppix.de).

This is a CD-based distribution, meaning that you put the CD into the PC, boot and you are in Linux-Land. You can still read all the files on your hard drive (even NTFS compressed folders, but not NTFS encrypted folders). When you want to return to Windows-World, just shutdown Knoppix, remove the CD, and reboot.

I ran like that for a few weeks before converting one of my main PC's to Linux so I could force myself to REALLY learn it.

It was a great way to test the waters and see what was out there.

Knoppix also makes a great recovery/utility CD for tech's because it comes with a ton of stuff. I actually recovered a non-booting Windows box by booting to Knoppix and FTP-ing all the important files over to a good machine. There are utilities for burning CD's, surfing the internet, working with MS Office files, etc.

Just another thought, perhaps a bit safer and less stressful than dual boot.

Leon

Leon Adato (adatole@yahoo.com)
Measure what is measurable,
And make measurable what is not so.
- Galileo