Partitioning to run windows xp
 

I have had Linspire 4.5 on my IBM thinkpad T21 for the past 6 months and it has run fine. However I want to wipe the hard drive and partition it to run both Linspire and windows xp. I was wondering if it is posible to run linspire as the main OS and have windows xp for games and certain programs.

Thanks, Bill

PS is there any p2p programs that are able to get through network firewalls. I know when I had windows the only one that worked was Kazaa lite k++.

he he he. That is called "dual booting". A lot of people do that.

Do realize that when you install XP, it will erase the MBR, therefore the bootloader will be gone. I'm not sure how Linspire does their rescue thing to reinstall the bootloader but you will need to find out before you put XP on there. Each distro sort of has their own way of doing that.

You may be better off to just wipe out the drive completely, install XP, then reinstall Linspire. Sort of get off to a clean new start. May have to since windoze really likes to be the first partition on the first drive anyway.

Hope that help and gives you a little BUMP.

:D :D :D :D

Windows XP should be able to be installed without being on the first partition. I've done it before. Just make sure you know how to recover Linspire's bootloader.

I'm new to the whole linux system so if someone could talk me through wiping my hard drive that would be great. I knew how to format the hard drive on a windows based system, but I don't know how to do it for lindspire.

thanks, Bill

OK, well, I've used Linspire so I know that it only runs on one partition with no swap space unlike every other distro ever made, so it should be easy enough. Just delete the partition off of the harddrive and make an NTFS partition at the beginning with how much space you want XP to have. Also, make a FAT32 Partition for the rest of the space for Linspire (Linspire won't use the Fat32 filesystem, it's just that Linspire's stupid installer doesn't let you make partitions in unallocated space, dont ask me why, i still wonder myself why linspire does some of the things they do, so a partition needs to already be there for it to overwrite). Anyways, get your XP set up, then boot off of Linspire's CD and tell it to overwrite the Fat32 partition and then when you boot it should ask you what OS you want to use. Hope that helps.