I need to setup my laptop for dual boot for school this year, but I have windows on the machine and I don't want to reformat the drive to partition it becuase I can't backup the data(no money for new hard drive for backup). Is there a way to still install fedora for dual boot and not harm the preexisting data.

There is no risk-free way to install fedora (or any other distro) as a dual boot to a hard drive which already contains windows.

There are live distros, and distros which run from DOS...

However, the standard method is to make all the invisible files visible, then defrag your hard drive. After which you can repartition to allow a dual boot. The process is remarkably reliable these days.

As for backups - you could back up your critical data to CD/DVD ROM. Windows itself is already safe if you have the install/rescue CDs. I can only guess that you have a great deal of data to protect.

I have used Partition Magic 8.0 many times to resize or use free space to create a new partition without loosing anything and never had a single problem, I have heard good things about Paragon Partition Manager which is free, I have never used this program but it should work just fine, I would still back up everything you absolutely need on a cd or dvd just in case.

http://www.download.com/Paragon-Part...ml?tag=lst-0-4

I have an 80gb drive with Windows and FC5 on it, for backup reasons I created a 20gb partition for Windows, a 45gb storage partition, and 15gb for FC5. This way if for whatever reason I have a problem with Windows that I cannot figure out I can format my c: and not lose anything important, I have My Documents linked to my d: and I store everything important on that drive, I have found this is a very good thing to do and has saved me more than a few times, this is the reason I haven't lost a single mp3 in over 7 years even though I've formatted many times in that time span, just something to think about if you do have to format.