Dual Booting Decision
 

Hi,
I am new to this but i was thinking about dual booting my Windows XP with Fedora Linux. (Fedora is better than redhat9 right?)

I was told "that my computer is working great why give it a reason to mess up" and i agree with that so I talked to a techie person.

She said that once you dual boot windows and linux, even if they are on different partitions they will be intermixed and it will work but down the road after the constant updates they will start to blend together and wont beable to be separated unless I reformat it.

So i have a nf7-s and i was thinking can i install another hard drive onto my SATA and have it work in parallel with my 2 IDE harddrives (1x80gigz & 1x120gigz).

So i was thinking if i buy a seagate and put redhat9 on my SATA then maybe i could dual boot it from there and have linux on its own hd. but i don't know much about SATA or Linux and i don't want to mess anything up. Plus I don't know if i can start up with SATA with IDE configured.
I would love for some people to respond and maybe write me a Guide what to do, or some Facts about SATA and IDE and DUAL BOOTING and if they can work together.

Thanks alot,
Bryon

P.s. I want to keep my computer working great with out any conflicts. so maybe just screw all that and buy a cheap computer to run my linux?

Dual booting on a single drive is fine, you have separate partitions and neither should interfere with the other. They certainly won't become "intermingled." Very occasionally third party partition tools like partition magic can screw your data up, but AFAIK it's pretty rare. SATA support is a bit tricky on Linux from what I understand, I don't have a SATA drive so I can't speak from experience on that though. Fedora is the new "free" version of RH (as opposed to RH enterprise version), so it has newer packages and is "better" I guess.

Thanks for the Quick Response. I need input so it can help my decisions to come. I am just scared of installing Fedora and starting up my computer just to get a black screen, with nothing working. I depend on this computer for college and if I am without it for even a few days it would be very bad for me. Plus I don't really have time to FIGURE OUT whats wrong, I just need it fixed. I will learn that along the way. I just heard that linux and MS boot records don't really get together when first starting out and other things of that nature.

http://cgi.techtv.com/messageboards?...age_id=2953473


Thanks,
Bryon

The dual booting thing is pretty straight forward.

Multiple drives shouldn't be a problem.

SATA support might be. You should just google for Linux+SATA+distro and I'd imagine that should give you most stuff about it, i.e. what the SATA drive support is like in the various distro's.

regards

John

" Plus I don't really have time to FIGURE OUT whats wrong, I just need it fixed."

If that is the case I suggest you save a couple hundred bucks, buy an
old box and experiment with that.

i've been dual booting xp pro and slack9 for the last five months or so -- different partitions on the same drive, and i've only run into trouble once. my problem > overlapping/intermixing partitions, heh.

imo, your techie friend is completely off here. while the two CAN intermix and overlap, it's very rare it happens. if it does happen, your partitions were screwed up to begin with -- i botched mine a few days back throwing a 9x OS into the mix and reinstalling XP after using DOS's FDISK to create the new partition. DOS's FDISK is not your friend, and i had i been thinking, i'd have used Linux's. Oh well, some times we learn the hard way.

if you want to try them on the same drive, and your installation media allows it, create your partitions, then reboot and run cfdisk -- if there's a problem, it's gonna let you know.

if you want to try fedora, i say go for it on a day when you have a few hours to kill. just back up anything you can't bear to lose, make sure you've got an xp disc on hand [or the six floppies, if your cd wont boot], then take the plunge. chances are, you won't have issues, but you're better safe than sorry and backups are always good to have. if worse comes to worse, you reinstall xp -- which is time you would have spent installing and tweaking fedora anyway. if it works, you've got a functioning dual boot and have saved yourself the cash you would've used on another hd or a second machine.

Ya know....... Where do they get some of these tech help people? Geesh! 'later on they will be so intermixed that all you can do is format'? WTF. What a freak! Not for nothing, but I boot Mandrake 10, Fedora Core 1, and XP all off of one had disk with no problems at all.