multiple operating sytems??

karan10489 · 08-23-2008, 04:41 AM

hey,everyone,i'm a new user, and i was wundring if its possible to have more than 1 operating systems on a machine, i have windows xp sp3,ubuntu 8.04,and fedora 9.
I want to try out ubuntu and fedora, so it wud be helpful if anyone cud tell me wat they are all about,i.e differences etc, and how i can have all3 if possbible.
Thanx

Nylex · 08-23-2008, 04:47 AM

Yes it's possible. You'll need a partition for each OS on your hard disk(s). When you install Fedora or Ubuntu, it should detect other operating systems that are present and add entries for them to the bootloader menu. If not, it's not too difficult to do yourself (relatively speaking, of course).

Larry Webb · 08-23-2008, 05:14 AM

There are multiple listings on booting multiple systems in our tutorials. If you decide to multi-boot then these will come in handy. As you can see everyone that has done it has a different view. If you are planning on changing distros every month or so I would advise learning the chain-loading method. This of course is another personal opinion.

http://www.linuxquestions.org/linux/...GUI_Multimedia

karan10489 · 08-24-2008, 12:18 AM

thanks guys..but is it also possible to create partitions, and install linux WITHOUT formatting my hard disk ,and losing the data, also, i have D: as a recovery drive(HP Backup and Monitoring) for C:,will partitioning it, render D: useless??

Nylex · 08-24-2008, 12:52 AM

You'll need to create partitions and build Linux filesystems on them. I don't think it's possible to use FAT32/NTFS for Linux, since those filesystems don't support Linux permissions and possibly other things. You can probably use something like GParted to shrink existing partitions. Obviously the other solution is to get another hard disk.

jay73 · 08-24-2008, 03:34 AM

A format wipes a partition clean so obviously anything stored in D: will be gone for good. I recommend getting the gparted livecd and resizing C instead. Of course, this is not possible if C is already full.