HOW to duel boot

[Moffat Cafe]

I have partitioned a hard drive using Partition Magic so that there is small primary partition for Linux (to be used ONLY for DSL internet browsing & email), and also a large primary partition for WinXP with no internet DSL connections.

How do I go about setting up this computer so I can power on and then select one of the primary partitions to boot to? Like say, I choose Linux--hit Enter and I,d be in the Linux operating system and I could browse the internet. Or, by selecting XP I can work in Photoshop.

Thanks.

 

[n0cmonkey]

LILO or grub will both work and one is typically installed during the Linux installation.

 

[Powermoloch]

you can have two hard drives =)

 

[SleepWalkerX]

I assume most linux distros that install grub or lilo automatically detect all other partitions on any hard drive it detects. That's how it is in Mepis.

 

[duragezic]

Sometimes you can choose what to boot by default, other times it just picks it, but it depends on the distro. Either way it is easily changed... /etc/grub_conf or something like that. If you have a hard drive that already has XP on it then you will need to use something to repartition it without destroying your data, or easier is just find a old 10gb hard drive so you can do whatever you want with linux to it and your XP will stay intact (and even if you remove linux later just use fixmbr to remove the bootloader)

 

[Fresh Daemon]

I recommend GRUB. Easier to work with and more up-to-date. I would say get a distro that's easy for beginners to work with, like Fedora Core, Ubuntu or Mandriva, these distros will repartition hard drives and install bootloaders for you. I believe all of them can non-destructively resize FAT32 partitions. Maybe even NTFS, but I would research that first. Partition Magic will do it for you, though. As with all things of this nature, please, please make a backup onto other media before you start with this.

 

[singh]

A duel boot huh? I'm not sure that's possible 😕 🙂