Windows XP and Linux RH 8.0
 

Hello everyone,
I have searched the forums regarding Win XP Pro and RH 8.0 dual boot.
I have found that it is possible to do it with GRUB and by installing it into mbr and making sure that I label the XP partition with something like 'Family Windows'.
However, there are a few other questions I was not able to find an answer to:

1) I have a 20Gb hard drive, partitioned as a 5Gb C drive and 15Gb D drive.
Both drives are NTFS. I have approx 4Gb free on D drive. I wish to partition the D drive and allocate 2Gb for RedHat 8.0. I have Partition Magic 8.0 and I know I can repartition and make a 3rd partition like E and I can also make it a Linux partition.
My question: Will RH 8.0 install in the 3rd partiton I will create for it ? I saw something about cylinder 1024 ... but I'm not sure how that would apply to my case. I'm hoping someone will have an insight.

2) If I decide to remove RH 8.0, how easy would that be, because once I remove it, I do not want to see GRUB asking me which operating system I want to use, since only XP will remain on there.


I wish to install RH 8.0 because I want to 'test' it. I have run RH when it was version 4.2 and also 7.3, but I had installed those when I didn't have any other OS's on the hard drive.
I'm not an expert at all.
Thank you for your time.

Postino

1) The best solution. Resize D: and don't create E: (RH can do this during installation). It will detect free space and use it. Cylinder 1024 problem affected older versions. You don't have to worry. RH8.0 is not affected.

2) fdisk/mbr from Windows boot disk. It's not hard to remove GRUB.

Hello Mara,
Thank you for your reply.
I have gone ahead and tried to install RH 8.0.
Needless to say, things did not go well :(
For some reason, the installation always got stuck at:
Transferring boot image to hard drive portion.
Never went beyond that.
With Partition Magic 8.0, I moved the XP partition to the end of the hard disk and then tried it... and this time it worked.
So, the 1024 Cylinder limit must still be there somewhere... maybe it is my BIOS that's causing the problem. After many searches, I came across a document that says that even though 8.0 deals with Cylinder 1024... if the computer is 2yrs or older it still won't work. And my computer is approx. 3 yrs old.
It was a good learning experience.
Postino