Dual-boot with CentOS or Fedora and WinXP

Dmjmusser · 02-17-2006, 02:23 PM

I'm looking to install either CentOS 4.X or Fedora Core 4 on my laptop. I've installed both before (using "Custom" configuration options for the install), but haven't noticed anything about being able to dual-boot the machine. I've already got WinXP on this guy, but I'd really like a *Nix OS on there.

I'm wondering about what I need to know to set this up, both in the *Nix install and the Windows setup. For now, I'll keep Windows where it is, as my primary OS until I've learned enough about Linux to feel comfortable using Windows minimally.

I'm not really sure where to start here. I actually don't even know if this will screw up the data on my hard drive (it's just a 20 gig drive, non-partitioned). Any help is greatly appreciated.

This is not as pressing an issue, but I've also wondered about Multi-booting...like having Windows XP and two or three *Nix OS's on there.

TIA.

~Myles

P.S. Sorry if this is the wrong place to post this. I only did it because Fedora is a Red Hat project and CentOS is based off RHEL.

Steel_J · 02-17-2006, 02:38 PM

First order of business...get more storage space. 20 gigs is not enougnt to dual boot. Especially more than 2 OS.

Usually, when you will start the install of your unix OS it will detect the Windows installation and install along side it with a boot loader that will give you the choice of OS to boot upon startup. Don't worry. It won't damage your data at all.

Then you can play with Linux at will and go back to Windows when needed.