I am a newbie. As of right now, I don't even have Linux installed on my home computer, a Dell 8300 Windows XP machine. I am leaning towards installing Red Hat Linux since it seems to be recommended by IBM and many other large Fortune 500 companies that I do business with as a DB2 UDB Linux DBA. So how do I install Linux on a dual boot basis where I can still run my Windows XP operating system and applications when I choose to do so. How do I partition my existing hard drive (C:\) to place Linux in a separate partition. How much would a second physical hard drive at 20 gigs cost, just a ball park number please, if I was to go this route. After I install Linux, I plan on installing IBM DB2 Universal Database (UDB) for Linux, the Personal Edition. DB2 UDB Linux will be used for business purposes and training purposes for DBA's wishing to learn DB2 UDB for Linux and Linux itself. I am also considering buying a brand new Dell Pentium INTEL computer for the purpose of running Linux and DB2 UDB. I could use another computer in my home and it only costs about $500.00. Are there any books you can recommend that covers dual booting and partitioning hard drives.

I would reccomend against Redhat, it's now considered very old. Instead, go for their new open-source project, Fedora.
Redhat for Dummies covers dual-booting and partitioning, and comes with a copy of Fedora.

Right, I'd suggest Fedora, or for production servers: RedHat ES / AS.

Additionally, you can partition your disk without losing your WinXP. This can be done with tools like PartitionMagic (not free though!). I can't come up with alternate tools to do this. Once you have created free disk space which can be occupied with Linux, you can install Linux, perhaps with a separate boot partition, and of course, a swap partition as big as (or twice as big as) your physycal memory size.

For 20GB, I'd be doing 5GB WinXP, 5GB Linux, 10GB Fat32 data storage, available from both platforms (no rights system on fat32 though).
If shared data storage is irrelevant you can swap sizes of Linux and data storage around (10GB Linux, 5GB Data storage), or any sharing between Linux and WinXP for that matter.

You can find similar post at http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...hreadid=275942

I would go larger than 20 GB for a second drive. For just a few bucks more you could get 40GB or a few more bucks, you could get a decent 80. Newegg has this 40GB drive for $45, there are some 80GB ones for as low as $55-$65. I only saw 1 -20GB drive but it was a retail box and cost $60.

-Nathan

Do all your disk clean-up, defrag, and back-up your windows first. Most linux distros will let you resize your hard drive during install. Once HD is partitioned you can try different distro's until you find one you like/works for you, all distro's are basically the same if you use KDE or Gnome.

Hey, I installed Fedora on my laptop, and resized my NTFS windows XP drive using a tool included in the Knoppix Live Linux CD called qtparted.
Check out this page: http://www.hut.fi/~tkarvine/linux-wi...zing-ntfs.html
This is exactly what you need, and instead of using Fedore Core 1, Use Core 3

But it is also nice to install Linux on a whole seperate hard drive, I don't know about others, but I had some boot problems when installing Linux on the Slave Hard drive.

-Sloik

NOTE: Be aware, you should run windows Chkdsk before resizing the hard drive, because if theres a problem.... Then your in trouble.
But all in all, you should be fine

I installed the SUSE Linux 9.2 distro on a Toshiba Satellite with GRUB dual boot; works fine after I helped it along to optimize the partitioning I wanted. I have XP still at the front of the HD & the SWAP and / root areas at the rear of the disk. I made the XP partition as LOW as possible (11 GB on my HD) so the when the MBR (Master Boot Record) containing the partitioning table was written, XP would still be bootable. This was a bug in 9.1 SUSE and still a bug in 9.2 if the XP partition size is above some unknown threshold.

Both XP & LX boot fine under the GRUB dual boot loader. Once I get a few more installation quirks solved, then I will use Partition Magic or "parted" (its Unix equivalent) to add a common FAT32 partition on the HD between the two operating systems that both XP & LX can access to xfr files back & forth.

Regards,
MoonRover