Booting XP and Fedora 13 on same partition
 

Hi all.

I am asking this question out of curiosity and knowledge gain. Pls guide me

I will practice it on vmware. I have currently 20 GB hard disk on which i had made only one partition at time of install (windows XP). Now i want to install Fedora 13 on it as well. I know ubuntu can do it easily (i have found alot of articles on that :-)), but can we do the same for fedora 13 ?

Basically what i am confused about is, my understanding is that, when data is written on hard disk, its not linear but rather spread out all over the disk. So in that case, how can another distribution (whether fedora, ubuntu, suse etc) can install on the same partition ?

Kindly help me understand why this happens and also can i do it with fedora 13 ?

The Ubuntu one basically creates a VM virtual disk and saves it to the windows hard drive. It then uses the official windows bootloader to load it. It also sucks compared to a separate-partition install, because of a few things not working right. You don't get to use the ext filesystem, and you don't get a swap file.

You can't do it with Fedora unless you code it yourself, and don't bother. It's a gimmick.

So how shall i proceed with installing xp and fedora on same partition ?

I read Fedora 11 and redhat enterprise bible. In that, the author used liveCd. Cant i do it without livecd ?

Any article related to it ?

Why do you want to do this? It will make both systems run slower. Just install them on separate partitions.

If you want to install Fedora and have only one parition on your computer, you can defragment xp, shrink the partition it is on, create another partition(s) for Fedora and install it. Why do you want them on the same partition?

You have 2 choices:

1. run Fedora using a VM soln inside MSWin
2. Backup MSWin, shrink MSWin partition & create a new partition & install Fedora in new partition.

You can't run 2 OSes in 1 partition.

Thanks alot guys. Basically i just wanted to practice different aspects of installing linux. Dual booting is one of them. I searched and got the same idea. Since now you guys have endorsed it, i can follow the procedure with confidence.

Thanks alot again