Hello all,

I've been enjoying Fedora 7 for the past few months, and I have unfortunately ran into instances that I need that OS from Redmond, WA to fully operate. SO!!! Here is my question...

How can I do 1 of the following two things:
1) Add Windows to my existing Fedora 7 installation and allow for a dual boot.

2) OR create a backup of my Fedora installation and run it on a virtual device using that other OS as the host OS, and Fedora being the guest. Basically so I don't loose all the hard work I've put into Fedora already.

Any ideas or directions would be greatly appreciated. THANKS!

You can use gparted to resize your Linux partitions. I think it would be best to use a live-CD to do so... I think you have to unmount a partition to resize it. Be sure to make a backup of any data you can't afford to lose.

When you made enough room, you can create a partition and install Windows. It will prob'ly bonk your MBR, so be sure you have a Fedora rescue disc to boot up Fedora and restore GRUB.

Of course, I've never done this, so I just know theory.

First off... backup all your stuff on Fedora.

When you install windows, it will overwrite your linux MBR & therefore your bootloader. Once that is done, you'll no longer be able to boot into linux until you rebuild your bootloader.

Doing such is not incredibly difficult... the short of it is that you boot off of a linux cd distro (knoppix, ubuntu, etc), open a shell, load grub, then tell it where your root is (where /boot exists) & where you want the MBR installed (the drive your BIOS is set to boot from). Something like:

root (hd0,0)
setup (hd0)

getting the drive mapping is a littler weird - think of it as an array starting at zero & only present drives are in the array, i.e.

sda1 == hd0,0

sdb1 == hd1,0, assuming you also have an sda, if you don't have an sda & sdb is your first hard drive, then it be hd0,0.

There are good docs on rebuilding grub - I especially like those that are in the gentoo install manual.

note - there may be some fancy "rebuild/repair" grub on your Fedora CD. I'm not sure.

Hey thanks all... I'll play around with some of these this week.