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Im attempting to dual boot windows XP with slackware 10 right now, but Im not exactly sure how I can do it. It will be on a laptop, so I do not have a floppy drive. I want to install slackware first and use cfdisk to partition my drive, but Im not sure what kind of partitions I should use. Ive got a 30 gig HD, and I want 12 of that to be linux, 8 to be windows, and 10 to be shared where I can store or transfer files between the 2 OSes. I am unsure though of what type of partitions I should make for all of the OSes, and how I can get away with installing windows second when I have no floppy drive. If anyone could offer me any advice, it would be greatly appreciated. I start college in 2 days and need to get my laptop up and running with both operating systems. Thanks.
corallis; u r decision but advise leaving wxp 1st installing slackware behind it, reduce xp,s size a bit to allow slackware space & its need for swapspace.
u did not mention size of ram? linux uses large amount of memory so depending how much u now have increase it. linux memory hog. just note:
got this pc desktop setup as advised w 1st -mdk8.1 on 40g ,128 mb & no problems. just a thought is laptop usb.2 equipted. use that with external
hdd/cd/dvd if possible. u`ll extend storage.
rather simple actually.
What I would do is put the windows xp disk in and use it to create the partitions making them the size you want. Then create another logical drive the size you want it, leave the rest as unused space. Install windows on the first partition
Then put in the slack disk and use cfdisk to create the linux and swap partition which would be the 3rd and 4th partition. Next type setup and first activate the swap partition
then scroll down and select the partition slack should go to. Then slack will ask you about the first two partitions automatically and ask you if you want to enable them, choose yes. Label the first one /fat-c and the second /fat-d this way you can cd /mnt/fat-c or /fat-d and mv files from linux to the second partition and so on so forth then proceed with the rest of the slack install. One of the best parts of the slack install in my opinion is how it does auto detect and allow you the chance to enable and label them for use while in the linux kernel.
Corallis - I'll assume that you've got Windows installed on your machine now (it would be helpful for you to identify the laptop you are using). In short, what you want to do (or, what I recommend that you do) is to:
1. Resize your Windows partition (presumably the entire 30G at this stage) to 8G using your favorite partitioning utility.
2. Determine how to partition the newly-available space. The "best" partitioning scheme is highly dependent on personal preferences, but I would suggest at least setting aside a separate partition to contain the /home directory.
3. Install Linux into that space.
4. Done - the Windows environment has been shrunk, and you've added Linux.
Obviously, I admit that I am oversimplifying this pretty severely. A different approach, assuming that you have the Windows and the Slackware installation CD's, is to:
1. Backup any important data on the machine
2. Blow away the entire hard drive, then repartition it in accordance with the plans you outlined above.
3. Install Windows; it will install itself into the first partition (/dev/hda)
4. Install Slackware into the appropriate partitions; install lilo to dual boot.
Again, I'm simplifying, but there are numerous existing threads here at LQ that cover this topic; I would suggest doing a Search on them if you haven't already. BTW a really good partitioning tool IMO is BootITNG from terabyte. Good luck with the project. FYI I'm dual booting XP and Slack v10 on an IBM T40 -- it rocks. Good luck with it -- J.W.
J.W. - did you install lilo to the mbr? or what?
I'm going to dual XP and RH WS3 on my T40. Looking for the safest way.
I always put grub in the mbr with W2K and had no problems but folks seem to have trouble with XP. I'd like to avoid that
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