Hi everybody

Last week I instaled Suse 9.1 on my computer. It works in dual boot with Windows XP and its everything is all right, they love each other like cat and dog.

My questions are for all of you who have a similar configuration on your computer:
1.What are the main dengers of dual boot system and what I have to care about.
2.What I must not do,if I want to use both OSs without problems


Thank you in advance.

On #2, are you asking what do you need to do to use both operating systems at the same time? If so, vmware is your best option.

Dual boots are great if there are instances where you still require IE or need to run windows applications. I'm not sure of what question 1 is asking, but if you got it installed and they both boot up, then all should be good.

- if you re-install windows, you will lose access to your Linux system until you re-install the Linux boot-loader
- if you install another distro (in addition), you most likely will have a clash of bootloaders

Search on LQ beforfe any such actions - plenty of others have hit these problems.

I had a dual-boot Windows XP and SuSE 9.2 working just fine on my laptop for about a month (actually it was a triple-boot as I was trying out Gentoo also). Last week I got rid of both of them though, but that is purely because Gentoo does everything I need, including DVD playback (which I couldn't get to work on SuSE, and needed commercial software on Windows). But as I said, they work fine together.

One thing I would say though is that if you need to be able to share/transfer files between them, it appears to be safest to have a separate partition which they can both access. FAT32 is the best format for this, as both Linux and Windows can safely read from and write to this filesystem. I presume your Windows XP partition is probably NTFS, and while Linux can safely read from this, it is not safe to write to it. Windows, of course, can't even see Linux partitions at all.

Thank you for your time and your posts,
As I wrote i have dual boot, but in next couple months I will remove Windows compleatety from my computer and use Linux.


Have a nice weekend, and of course If you know some more secrets about dual boot, please write it down for people who need advices.

How to have an absolutley rock sollid stable dual boot system uninstall the microsoft aspect of it