Preparing a HD for dual-boot - anything special I need to do?

[MichaelD]

I'm building a box tonight and putting WinXP on it. I want it to be dual-boot with SUSE 9.1, which I don't have yet (it's in the mail). Can I just add the Linux later to another partition?

How do I do this? Do I need to create two equal-sized partitions? What about IP assignment? Help, please.

 

[buleyb]

Not sure if SuSE 9.1 has a fix, but many of the 2.6 distro's had issues with dual booting because of the hard drive geometry. how to solve, make sure your bios has your HD in LBA mode.

 

[MichaelD]

LBA=Logical Block Addressing, right? Isn't it that way by default?

So, it's this latest version of SUSE that wont' work, huh? Dang. Well...I guess I'll just wipe Winderz off the HD and load up Linux when it gets here.

Winderz, I know...Linux I need to (try) to learn.

 

[jpeyton]

You need one of these.

 

[silverpig]

It'll work. How big is your hard drive?

I've had numerous 2.6 kernels dual booting fine (2.6.0, 2.6.3, and 2.6.7 now).

Make a 12-15 GB linux partition if you have a fairly large drive. Make a 1 GB swap partition. It's a good idea to have a decent sized fat32 partition as well so you can communicate between operating systems as both linux and windows can read and write to fat32. Here's what I have:

74 GB raptor:
25 GB ntfs c: windows
15 GB reiserfs / linux
1 GB linux swap
33 GB fat32 e: communication partition

120 GB drive
ntfs d: for storage of data

 

[MichaelD]

Wow...this is a bit over my head.

Why do I need such a huge HD? I have a 40GB drive I was planning on using.

I can make a 15GB NTFS partition for Windows. That would leave 25GB available for everything else. Once I get Linux, I install it to a partition I"ll create in the empty space...then what? How do I get the machine to boot to "this or that?"

 

[jose]

That should work. 15GB ntfs & the rest for Linux. I'm not familiar w/ Suse but it should have an option during the install to use a boot loader. ie. Lilo or Grub.
You'll need to setup min. of 2 partitions ie. / & /swap this is again during the setup portion. Do not let the Linux install do this automatically, select the option for a custom install.
I'm more familiar w/ RedHat's distro's, at the boot loader part of the install it should let you select where to install the loader. ie mbr or under "/" partition. select the mbr, this will give you the option to boot windows or linux when you turn on your computer.

The reason someone above mentioned having a fat32 partition, is because Linux cannot write to ntfs, it will read but won't write. Also when you make the /swap partition make it at the end of the drive. Also it helps to install everything , because later when you start compiling progs. you won't have to check which lib's you have. Also some device drivers require them to be compiled. ie equinox & digi port cards. I'm guessing that the min. you would need to install everything would be 10 gigs. w/ a little space leftover to mess w/ stuff.

Regards,
Jose

 

[Raincity]

Suse 9.1 will automatically repartition and format the rest of your drive space and setup the boot loader to coexist with windows. The install is pretty much foolproof. You have nothing to worry about.