question about dual-boot
 

i have a win xp laptop, i want to put rh 7.2 on it and i want to set up a dual-boot system. the win filesystem is ntfs. I was wondering if I could do set it up to do it that way. Any help is appreciated.
Thanx

The PenGUIn Lives On!!!!!!!
:Pengy:

Installing Linux on NTFS? Nope, probably not for a few years anyway. Besides, who'd want to, its a shoddy filesystem anyway. There are 2 ways to go about doing what you want to do:

1) Forsaking the XP install, re-partitioning the laptop's drive into 2 sections and installing both OS's separately.

2) Using a tool like Partition Magic (a commercial product) to squish the window's partition down, freeing up enough space to have a Linux partition, actually a couple of them as Linux has to have a seperate partition for swap.

Cheers,

Finegan

Not sure about 7.2, but Mandrake 8.* comes with a graphical partition tool that resizes partitions and fips on CD1.

No matter what, you MUST defrag thoroughly the entire HD. Set up a sleep time like 6 hours later. In addition, you should back up your files.

Install RH. Don't install anything on MBR. You won't be able to boot XP if you do. Then do the following in Linux.

boot from the redhat cd and run rescue
chroot /dev/hda1
lilo
dd if=/dev/hda1 of=boot.lnx bs=512 count=1
cp boot.lnx /mnt/floppy
boot XP
copy boot.lnx c:\
edit boot.ini
add a line after multi(0)
C:\boot.lnx="linux"
reboot

live linux cd's ( dvd's preferable)
 

You can run Linux on a CD or DVD(no hard disk required). Here or some ready made distributions that run off of CD's:

http://demolinux.org/
http://lab.dyne.org/DyneBolic/
http://www.vianova.at/index.php?prod...r_overview_eng
http://my.netian.com/~cgchoi/EASYLinux_en.html


Imagine running it off of a dvd-rw (or cd-rw) using the UDF filesystem. In case you don't now what UDF is, it is a standardized filesystem that is used for optical media like cd-rw's and dvd-rw's. It allows these optical media to behave much like magnetic media: random access read and *write*. It's not as fast as magnetic media, yet, but it still works!

Here are some links for UDF filesystems on cd's and dvd's

http://www.kernel.dk/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/linux-udf/
http://www.trylinux.com/projects/udf/index.html
http://www.bitwizard.nl/udf/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/packet-cd/

It's also possible to make linux run off of a read-only cd ( but not as desirable ). For example, you can use a ramdisk as your root file system and create symlinks onto the the read-only cd. This is kind of an ugly way of doing it, but it works!

If you want to use a read-only filesystem it would be better use a Copy on Write (COW) filesystem driver that allows a writable ramdisk to be mounted or "layered" on top of a read-only disk. Whenever a read-only file needs to be modified, a copy would be automatically created in the writable layer.