partitioning for XP and RedHat 9
 

I'm using a laptop and I want to have a dual boot with XP and RedHat 9. I heard that you can create a FAT32 partition as an extra partition so that it can be recognized by both linux and xp. This is what i've done so far. I have one 60GB drive so i made 40Gb NTFS for xp and installed xp. Then i installed redhat 9 and split the remaining into 10GB for "/" and 500MB for swap, and the remaing as VFAT because i thought that might have worked like the FAT32 idea and work in both linux and xp. But the VFat isn't usable in xp.

Is it true that Fat 32 can be used for both os's? and if so then what's the best way to get it to be FAT32?

Thanks!

hi
can u tell how many primary partitions du u have
give the output of

#fdisk /dev/hda

then 'p' at the fdisk promt

fat32 is for Winxp but Red Hat Linux need ext2 file format .So I recommed you to go Winxp and right click on mycomputer and go to mangement and go to disk mangement and delete the Linux partion Linux partions and make them free space and next time boot from RedHat 9 cd and continue and setup and using graphical mode and continue Linux installing .Then you will have Winxp and Linux both.

Re: partitioning for XP and RedHat 9
 

You heard right and wrong. You can setup RedHat Linux to read your NTFS partition. It will not be done automatically for you because RedHat is touchy about the copy rights of this field. Mandrake is more supportive toward this. However, there is a RH package which does provide a read only access to NTFS for RH distributions. There is also a read/write version, but would require a fee.

Redhat however, does support vfat (fat32) on install. When you install the partition, simply locate the vfat on diskdruid (manual setup) and mount /mnt/win_c to have the installer automatically set this up for you. If you need to set this up manually, you will need to access a file called /etc/fstab. This file manages automatic mounting on boot. Manually setting it up would require mount -t vfat /dev/hd??(if you have only one HD, it will be hda1,something) /mnt/win_c (provided you made this directory).

Good luck bud.