How to set up both XP and Red Hat 8.0?

[aplusc]

Ok here is my situtation:

1. I had one harddrive 40 GB, FAT32 (C: drive), on which I had Windows XP installed.

2. Since my first hardrive has almost not free space installed, I decided to buy another 120 GB hardrive.

2. After installing, XP formatted the entire thing to NTFS as single partition (F: drive).

Now I decided to install Red Hat Linux 8.0 on the 120GB hardrive. Since 120GB is definatelly overkill, I just want to allocate a 10GB patition for Linux and leave the rest. How do I do this? In Partition Magic 8.0, the entire thing is shown as a Dynamic Disc and I can't do anything with it. BTW, I don't really care if the data on the 120GB disk gets destroyed.

Any ideas?

 

[zaneryrie]

Hi aplusc,

The way I see it, you have two options. I don't believe that RH8 will deal well with NTFS. You could reformat it as FAT32 and then install Linux on top of it, or you could just delete all of the partitions on the drive and let the install partition and format it the way that it wants to. You will probably have to boot from a floppy tho, unless RH can boot from the second drive.

I have never done a two drive install, but I know with a single drive dual boot setup with xp and Linux you need to go with FAT32.

Hope this helps!

zr

 

[salder]

Not true. You can have NTFS and Linux on the same drive.

The best way to accomplish what I believe you want ( a true dual boot system ) would be to use Partition Magic to unallocate about 150MB on your C:drive, and then to unallocate another 10GB on your F:drive. The remaining partitions can be just about anything else you want. Then throw the RH CD in and start the installation. During which, you will want to make sure that it uses only UNALLOCATED space. It will find the 150MB and make it your /boot , which should allow you to boot without a disk. Just choose to have GRUB be your bootloader, it will find your existing XP load and create you an option to select when you want to go back to Windows. Though it will denote this as MS-DOS I believe, you might want to change that during installation. Otherwise everything should be good.

If you can't find 150MB on your C:drive to unallocate. Then you MIGHT have to boot with a floppy. Haven't been down that path yet. But you should be able to find something you can move to that large 110GB F:drive.

Have fun.. .good luck.. .and remember to make the boot floppy when it asks during installation.