So last time I installed Linux on my laptop I lost the ability to boot to the windows partition and had to fix the bootloader with a windows disc. Is their a way to install Fedora Linux and dual boot with Windows 7 that does not mess up the bootlader for Windows? Sorry to ask such a noobish question.

Yes.

How you do it depends upon what you want to do. Do you want to install Fedora on the internal hard drive of your laptop? Do you have any other operating systems on your hard drive other than windows 7? Is this an OEM or did you install windows 7 yourself? Do you want to use the Fedora Grub bootloader or the windows 7 bootloader?

Once you answer these questions and post some partition information, you should be able to get some very specific instructions on what to do. I don't know if you have the Fedora CD yet but, if you do, you can boot it up from the CD drive and open a terminal as root and run the command:

fdisk -l (lower case Letter L in the command)

If you're not familiar, post back for more information.

I'd suggest that you consider using a virtual machine to help protect your windows install and allow you to use linux. I use VMware's free VMplayer. It is a windows program like MS Office that allows me to run linux at the same time as Windows. I can create and delete BSD,QNX,Windows,BeOS and almost any number of x86 and x86-64 guest virtual machines.

But to answer your question, one could use the Windows bcd to select windows or linux.


Consider also choices like live cd's and live usb flash drives. I always have some flash drives with linux on it. They boot quite fast and if done correctly will not harm your windows.

By far the most safe way is to use live cd's or virtual machines.

Gparted-live-cd and hiren's-boot-cd have the boot os option on it.

Hi, mine is also a similiar concern. i recently got an HP lappy with Quard core processor i7, with windows7, 64bit. As i did not want to loose windows7, so thought of dual booting.But, when i insert the RHEL5.3(64bit) CD and boot up, it throws a Fatel Error and hangs up. i wonder if windows7 can be dual booted with RHEL??? Nextly, i tried to install virtual machine and then opt for linux on it but then, the USB port gets disabled.

Kindly suggest on this. Is that RHEL5.3 is not the right one to go with this configuration. But i want to stick to rhel only.

Thanks in advance.........

I have found that the Fedora installer does not look for other operating system so the boot menu does not include them by default. So you have to add an entry for Windows yourself.

I just looked at the Fedora web site. It looks like they are still using the original GRUB boot loader. I'm not sure if that is compatible with Windows 7 but it worked fine with Vista. The Windows boot process changed with Vista so if it worked with Vista then it should work with Windows 7.

Anyway, once you get Fedora installed you have to edit the /boot/grub/menu.lst file and add the following lines at the bottom of the file.

GRUB one start counting at zero .
root (hd1,0) that means you are assuming that windows is located at sdb on the first partition
If windows is located at sda 's first partition than in my opinion it should be (hd0,0)
But I may be wrong

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