dualbooting centos
 

i want to put centOS on my compyter and dualboot it with windows.

right now i have 2 hard drives formatted in fat32. my c drive has my widnows install and programs on it, with abuot 30 gigs free

my d drive has a bunch of saved documents and music and stuff.

what i want to do is take away about 15 gigs from my C drive and partition it to have linux on it. i also want my linux to be able to see files in all the partitions as well as windows.

is this a practical thing to do?

Yes but...
 

Do be sure to back up anything really important. I have had zero problem installs, and once I lost everything in Win and had to start over. Your first time it's easy to make mistake.

Since you are FAT 32, it seems likely you are not XP. Do be aware that XP defrag does not COMPRESS all HD contents to front of HD, as Win 98 did. So, it is possible to think you are compacted and that 15GB are free, when they are not.

I think virtually all distros can read Fat 32 partitions. It will be necessary to mount them if the distro does not do so by itself.

I have CentOs, I think 4.3, on an old Compaq, 400MHZ with 20GB HD, multiple booting not only with Win98, but also one or two other distros. The only one that can't see anything else is Win... There is a file explore2fs that installs in Win and lets you take one file at a time FROM linux.

I use it all the time on XP, and Mandriva and others usually will READ Win okay.

maybe its not fat32? ill have to double check
i am running windows xp though.

the real thing im concerned abuot is it possible to retract disk space from one partition and put it into another one without erasing the whole contents of the partition.

bump








^

i have win xp and centos 4.3 with duel boot. had no problems during installation and he red my ntfs partitions.
it should be no problem read and write on FAT32. alltough i had to mount the partitions by myself by putting them on my fstab file.