I am going to pull the trigger on this dual boot soon, and need to know for sure...

I have a sony vaio with two 120gb hd, (running xp)
I am thinking of putting rh9 on E:
which is empty...

the (SAM) book I bought is just un-specific enough about my situation. I wish to know the answers to these 2 questions.

1. If I just choose the correct drive (E during installition and choose the 'keep all partitions and use free space' option I will install rh9 on E: ONLY?

and

2. Both windows and linux will be able to read/ write on space available on E: after the installation? (120GB is a lot of room)

Measure twice cut once...
thanks

If it is unallocated/unformatted then yes that would be the perfect choice. Good for you, doing your homework!



yes but not without some work (but what a grand way to learn eh?). RH9, I believe does not automatically have ntfs read/write support.

if you are using a fat32 filesystem it is very easy to add read/write features, however; if you are using ntfs, then you need to download a specific file and I can't say for sure that you will get write access to it, but at least you will get read access.

There are instructions on how to do this on my guide. Check out the helpful hints page.
Actually, read the whole thing, if you find it informative.

thank you both.

yes, ntfs is what I have.
I may be dense but after I put rh9 on E:
am I right to believe windows will be able to read/ write on E: but rh9 will not?
that doesn't seem too good. or maybe I have it backwords, but that is not good either.
Is the solution making E: fat32 first?

the root of the question is
how do I ensure that both xp and rh9 can read and write on E: after rh9 is installed?

this is gonna get detailed, if you want, message me thru icq or somethin and i can answer the questions in there.
I have msn, icq, yahoo, aim
let me know if you want any help.

You can also downsize your ntfs partition by, say 10 gb, and create a fat32 shared partition out of the remaining space. Then all you'd need to do would be to mount the shared partition while in linux, and voila - you can read and write to it with both OS's.

Dear Virgin

In response to your last post, please don't confuse Linux (or any unix, so to say) with the concepts of Microsoft. The drives that you see as C:, D:, E:, etc are not available in Linux. Rather, you get mountpoints at various levels. for example, the CD-ROM you have as F: will be replaced by /mnt/cdrom in Linux (mind the play of slash and back-slash as well). So, your plan to access RH partitions from Windows, though possible, is HIGHLY DISCOURAGED. same goes for accessing NTFS write access from RH.

In fact, once you install RH there will be no E drive from windows. To save yourself from this situation, you should downsize the E drive (with partition magic or something similar) and have un-allocated space for linux (5GB min, to play freely).

Please go through a few more documentations before actually donig the install. And even then, please Backup ALL YOUR VALUABLE DATA as it will be quite easy to trash everything through linux.

Happy linuxing.

awdoyle has your answer. Create a part on E: that is fat32. XP and RH can both use that space.