Dual booting suse and mandriva and xp
 

Hello,
I want to Dual Boot suse linux 10.0 and mandriva and windows xp
.How should i do it?

first you should have windows installed and get boot cds for both mandriva and suse. These can be burned from iso's on distrowatch.com. next boot from one of the cds and install linux. You will need to repartition your current harddrive or add another harddrive in order to make a space to install linux. Then tell the installation to add lilo or grub into the MBR of the windows drive. Do the same for the next and you should be up and running.

They're right -- you shouldn't double post. Amongst other things it can make it difficult for people w/ similar problems to find all the answers that were offered.

Let's hope OP requests that the 2 threads be combined, by reporting his own post.

Here is the other (closed) side of this thread:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...hreadid=461972

Hint to those who are trying find such related threads, open or closed: click on the OP's name & go to "View Public Profile", then click "Find all threads started by ...". They are displayed in reverse chronological order & as long as the related threads were started at close to same time, they should be easy to find. You can always search the resulting "Search: Threads Started By:" page for a word or 2 from the Subject.


Note to Jeremy & all moderators:

When closing threads for double posting, please consider the innocent bystanders -- folks not involved in the discussion who come here to benefit from it -- & think about inserting a link in the closed thread(s) pointing to the open one.

If you are booting more than two operating systems, it's called multi-booting. :)

Assuming Window is already installed, the first step is to backup the Master Boot Record (MBR) and partition table. If you don't do this, you must perform the sacred rituals to appease the Multi-Boot Installation Gods. There are several tools available, one tool that has many many such useful utilities is:
http://ultimatebootcd.com/ (scroll down or search for Partition Tools)

If you don't like that one, google: save restore mbr partition table

Now that your MBR and partition are safe (unless you had no operating system already installed), you can follow the advice of tamoneya. Estimate your disk usage, and plan your partitions. Essentially, how many partitions will you need, how big should they be and what goes on each one. There is also the detail of what filesystem to use for each partition. Here are some things to consider:
* Making an NTFS data partition for WinXP, so that you can put all your valuable data on a partition separate from the Windows system and applications. That way, if Windows crashes, you can reinstall it (after saving your MBR and partition table, of course, since a new Windows installation will overwrite the MBR) without losing any valuable data. This also makes it easier to manage your data.
* Consider making a small /boot partition, and figure out whether the 1024-cylinder boot limit affects you, as this will affect where you should put it.
* Suse and Mandriva will be able to share a swap partition between them.
* You will want to share other partitions if possible. You might consider making an appropriately sized FAT32 partition to share data between all 3 operating systems. If you just need to share between Mandriva and SuSE, use a Linux filesystem instead, such as ext2, ext3, ReiserFS, or whatever else they both support well.
* If you have two hard-disks, you get more space, but it also makes multi-booting slightly more complicated.


Anyway, install WinXP first, making sure to limit the size of its partition. If it is already installed and taking up too much disk space, use the correct utility to resize it. Another warning: be absolutely sure to have all your valuable data backed up first. Once WinXP is installed on an appropriately sized partition, then install whichever of SuSE or Mandriva you prefer to next. I would choose to install first whichever one I thought myself most likely to keep. The one you install last is most likely to be the one that overwrites the MBR last.


As a last step, once everything is installed and you are a happy camper, backup your MBR and partition table again, to protect yourself from future mischief. You should do this everytime you create new partitions or change your MBR.

Have fun, make backups first, and be patient.

Coffee and sympathy help.

In addition to backing up the Partition Table & the MBR, you might want to look at sfdisk -d (RTFM ;))

Backing up the MBR only saves the locations of your (up to) 4 primary (including the extended) partition. sfdisk -d can save your entire partition structure including the logical partitions -- which are not included in the MBR. The "-d" options causes the the output to be in a format suitable for later input to sfdisk, i.e. at restore.

There was a really good, detailed, how-to on this topic on Distrowatch a while back. I cant seem to find the link to it. Does anyone remember that and have that link I'm talking about?

EDIT: Found the link, here it is: http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20040614

Nice tip, I'll look into this. It might be a bit overwhelming though for folks new to installation, much less the CLI. The main point remains to backup the MBR and partition table. And anyway, as long as the EBR of the extended partition isn't overwritten, which is far less likely than with the MBR when dealing with mutli-booting issues, restoring the MBR and partition table effectively restores all the logical partitions. But you're right, why not back everything up.

There's always more than one way to skin a cat. :)

:) Patches would resent that!


Seriously, good point about CLI intimidation.