Hi all,

So, here's the deal. I have a desktop with Vista pre-installed. I have no boot disks or anything for this machine, and can't re-partition. I also have a netbook with Fedora 12 installed (which we did recently to replace Linpus because I had a slight accident where I managed to uninstall everything except the audio controls! Linpus is pants anyway IMHO).

I absolutely detest Vista with it's manic account control system and general inability to be stable or support anything, and I'm not impressed with Microsoft farming out beta versions of operating systems to reduce testing/validation costs, and am genuinely starting to love Fedora 12. I was considering just wiping the PC and having a Fedora system, but there are apps/games that I want to be able to use/play so want to go dual boot with Fedora and XP (Fedora for when I need internet, XP for non-internet stuff).

I've never tried to dual boot before so I'm hoping you guys can give me some advice.

Really I don't know where to start, and not all the terminology is clear to me. Can someone lay down in steps what I need to do? I have searched but can't find any definiton as to where I start.

I have a bootable usb drive which fedora is sitting on, and a copy of XP, so I think I have the necessary software, and I know I need to re-format my HDD but into what partitions?? Do I need any other software? Does XP need to be installed first (read that installing XP after does something somewhere).

Anyway, any help is really appreciated.

many thanks,

Kat

It's easier if you install XP first, just give it as much disk space as you want and leave the rest unallocated. When you install Fedora, you can set up either two partitions: swap and /, or three: swap, / , and /home. The size of swap depends on how much RAM you have.

installation of dual boot required understanding.

you can install XP then remain free space for Linux.
then install fedora in free space.
The main issue i have experience is overwriting MBR for both the OS.
Otherwise only one OS will be accessible.

one solution is install Linux then windows.

Windows will overwrite MBR.

Now put live CD of Linux and reinstall the boot grub.

If your system does not have critical data then you can freely do any kind of experiment.

I've dual-booted many distros with XP, using lilo or grub bootloaders, always in the MBR, with no trouble at all. If you want complications, do it sohail0399's way.