Dual-booting Linux on PC pre-installed with Windows XP
 

Hello

I wish to dual boot Linux with XP. I have a PC pre-installed with Windows XP thus no installation CD.

I have PartitionMagic and a boot manager installed. I also have Red Hat Linux installation CDs.

I am able to create partitions, reducing the XP partition. However I am unable to install Linux as it says "no device drivers found" and "no valid devices" or drives found, on the installation screens.

Any help would be much appreciated!

Cheers
Mikhail

Please, before you go any further, make some install CD's for the XP system, and make a ghost image of the current XP install. Norton Ghost will repair your XP system if you make a mess, and you will be glad you have the XP CD's someday. Google for instructions for making the CD's using the present installed system; it is not too hard but I don't remember too well how to do it.

Good luck.

C

Ok, now if you have the XP recovery tools we can start on Linux.

I will bet that the partitions you are trying to install to is formatted as NTFS. Linux does not like NTFS. NTFS is bad; empty space is better than NTFS. Linux can read and write to any file system, but NTFS requires something special. Use your partitioning tool to make the future linux partitions blank un-formatted space, or format to FAT32, then try again. Linux will format and partition during the install.

What version of Red Hat do you have? If you did not buy it, it is way out of date; the downloadable version of Red Hat stopped with 9.0, and that was long ago. If you want to download Red Hat, you go get Fedora Core now. I think the latest is version 5.

Good luck.

C

Thanks for the advice, think'll download as you suggested