Red Hat 8 / Win XP install
 

I have a 80gb hard drive with win XP installed (NTFS) ,.. I also Have a 10gb drive with Red Hat 8 on it (just installed)

Is there a way to dual boot off seperate hard drives?

If not, can I install red hat 8 on the same 80 gb drive (NTFS) as my curreny windows is on WITHOUT reformatting?,.. I can NOT lose the data on the drive,.. is this possible?


thanks to anyone who can help!
-mike

You can dual boot off two drives, either by installing and configuring a boot loader like Lilo or the NT loader.
And installing on same 80 gig drive without reformatting/repartitioning won't happen. Linux needs its own partitions. You can use some programs like FIPS or Partition Magic to safely resize your hard drive to make empty partition to load Linux though.

Ugh.. xp is soo evil

That was a helpful and constructive post...

Please don't post if you don't have anything constructive to say. Its actually a rule if you hadn't noticed ever. Thanks.

Is there an advantage in repartitioning with partition majic rather than dual booting via a boot loader? Is one or the other faster?
Also, one more question, If I use the 2 seperate drives, will linux read the windows NTFS drive's files?

In order to have a dual boot system you have to have seperate partitions. Theres a lot of free partitioning tools out there but a lot of them don't work with NTFS so most people are forced to use partition magic.

Linux can read NTFS drives if you have NTFS support in your kernel.

Im ont here to advertise, but Partition Magic is a great partitioning program that can be used from withing windows to repartition a HD without loosing data (defragging first, of course). Ive used it many times, and its easy.

i've also gotten it to work under wine, but ive never actually re-sized a partition with it in wine.

with partition magic, you can do everything form resize, to move, to creating, converting, merging, just about everything.

sounds good,.. ill get partition magic,.. do i need to label my new partition a certain way, or make multiple new partitions for linux? I recall somebody telling me awhile ago that linux needs multiple partitions,. but i dont know about red hat 8,.. Can anyone tell me how many partitions / what I should call the partition(s) ? (i dont know if it needs to be labelled something specific)

thanks to everyone for helping out a linux n00b

Just make 2 partiitions with partition magic. One for Linux and one for Windows. The linux installer will take care of partitioning the Linux partition.

ok,.. I did that,.. everythig installed fine,.. I chose to install lilo,.. however when it rebooted I get 'no operating system found'
The only way I can get to anything is from booting off the linux cd and choosing rescue,.. that will get my to the propmt,.. I think I need to configure the loader, but have no idea how. Can anyone help!?