First of all, let me tell you that I take the word newbie to a new dimension! Please forgive my ignorance but up to a week agao, Linux was just some strange thing I had heard about but never considered as a usable operating system (imagine my surprise now!)

In short, I successfully installed and am having fun playing with linux on a backup system built from spare parts including my old compaq presario 4 gb hard drive! Amazing that such a new OS will work on such junk!

Now I would like to try slowly migrating and weaning myself off of windoze. I rely on win XP to run Quicken, pay bills online and most importantly playing neverwinter nights online (that's where I had my intro to Linux as they seem to be Linux friendly)!

So, I thought, hm I will just have a dual system to run both OS's as I have heard about this before. After Googleing all around about my particular situation (Fedora and windows) I realize that it is not as easy as it seems. There are many links to advice and tips from pros and people who really know Linux, but unfortunately to me as a "brand-newbie", they are speaking a completely different language. I read the website on "making fedora and windows play nice" or whatever and I'm going to try to go through that but my problem is they say "just copy this or that to your boot partition this or that". I am so new that I don't even know how to copy a file! Please don't flame me yet, I have a nice 1000 page book on Linux and I'm dedicated to learning and I have some background in Apple Basic and C++ coding (long time ago) so I'm not uncomfortable, I just don't know yet what to enter and even how to get to the text console thingy from the GUI.

What I really would like to know is why can't you just unplug the hd windows is on, install fedora on a new hard drive and then just choose which hd to boot from from the BIOS. Why wouldn't this work? Don't worry about getting too technical, you will probably just loose me but I am correct that this will not work for some strange reason, correct?

Well, maybe someone here would be kind enough to hold my hand through this painful procedure or maybe I should just wait until I know more about Linux...

Oh, btw, reinstalling XP is not an option for me. I would like to avoid that like the plague. I have an upgrade copy but no copy of win98 that will load on my computer (don't ask )

Thanks for the advice in advance!

ares416; as of this moment am on dual mode,mdk&w98se. took advice from some thing read. as follows: leave w untouched but reduce it size on disk space with just enough to add apps later. then installed mdk on rest of disk including swap-space 2x ram installed. reasoning linux memroy-hog. preformance is better. here are my specs; mdk8.1, kernelv 2.4.8_26, 40gb hdd, 128ram, pII deschutes cpu, ati videocard, cdrom& cdrw, dialup modem.
am satisfied with rig & no problems. setup almost problem free excluding linux
no problems at all.!

hmm, sorry for my long post. I just realized how wordy I was

I believe the problem is with the newer kernel 2.6.whatever which is what I have. It tries to reconfigure drive geometry in othere disks including windows during install.

So to get straight to the point:

Is this only a problem during install of fedora or other kernel of 2.6?

If yes, then can I simply pull out my windows drive and install linux on a completely seperate drive? (and still be able to boot windows )

If no, then I will try to follow the directions on that one link about making windows and linux play nice. At a quick glance it's a bit intimidating.



By the way, if no one responds within one day, I will assume that I have stumped all of you experts and therefore you can consider yourself stumped by such a newbie. jk, desperate plea for help

ares416; try the http://tldp.org/HOWTO/
HOWTO-INDEX zero in on the sections
that relate to what u r seeking. it has (9)
sections and expending (opening) each section pertaining to what u r looking for. expend will give u complete information in detail of how to.