First post here.

I just got a new 60gb hard drive for my compaq P4 notebook. I am going to do a dual boot setup with Win XP Pro and Linux. I am looking at using Fedora Core 2 but that is still up in the air. Is FC2 a good, stable OS for dual-booting?

Also, I have been doing a lot of research but before I went ahead and started to set everything up I wanted to run the process I am going to use by you to make sure it will work the first time.

1. Download the 4 i386 iso images, do the md5sum on the downloaded images, write them to CD and then check those iso's too.

2. Format HD with ~45gb for XP formatted in NTFS and ~1gb formatted in FAT32 (for file swapping between XP and Linux) and leave the rest (~14gb)unpartitioned for Linux.

3. Once XP is installed and running on its partition, reboot computer with first linux disk. Let it format the remaining space on the HD for itself. Install.

I think that is everything I need to do but someone correct me if I am wrong or if another way would work better. I am not going to have any personal info on the linux side so is 14gb going to be enough? I am mainly going to use linux to connect to my school's servers, etc. Do I want to make the FAT32 partition bigger, or is there a better way to swap files?

Also, I am confused with the /swap and /root partitions. Is the /swap just the FAT32 section I made or is it a section within the linux partition that is made during the install?

Thanks a lot for the help.

swap is virtual memory space wich linux uses if the RAM on your system isn't sufficient to hold all your temp info while running the PC. If you have a lot of memory you may not need a swap partition but it's always good to have one. The root partition is where all your system files are kept. You will also hear of other partitions such as /usr , /var, /home etc , don't worry much about them but try and familiarise yourself with Unix directory stucture to understand what they are all about. On my desktop system I set up Linux to have a root (/) partition, swap parition and /home (where all personal files and settings are saved). You can just use one partition for your Linux system, just like Windows, but it's not really recommended. The advantage I find of having a seperate /home partition is I can upgrade my Linux distro without losing my personal files.

I hope I helped a bit.

Yeah, that should work. It's always best to install Windows first on a dual boot system, and then Linux. Once you finish installing Linux, it will install a boot loader on your system (etiher GRUB or LILO), and you'll have the option to choose which OS to boot.

And the root (/) partition is the main Linux partition. I'd give the root partition plenty of space (you said 14GB, so that's perfectly fine, I'm using a 5GB install for a Linux distro on my laptop). The swap partition is similar to Windows PageFile, in that it's temporary space used when programs need more space than your RAM can handle. I'd make the swap at least 500MB, if not a bit more.

Other than that, everything sounds good.

Thanks for the help

So the /home and /swap partitions are created when installing linux right? So if I leave ~1gb in FAT32 to swap between XP and linux and take the ~14gb left for linux and partition about ~1gb for /swap, ~1gb for /home (in case I have any files I have created in linux if I want to upgrade) and let linux install the OS on the other 12gb?

Where should other programs I want to install on linux go? Should I make the /home bigger and install the programs there, or just install them on the other 12gb partition? If I install them in the /home and I install another linux distro, will the programs still work?

Now i am thinking maybe my partitions should look like this....

~45gb for XP (NTFS)
~1gb for swap (FAT32)
~14gb for linux
......~1gb for swap
......~5gb for linux OS
......~8gb for home

I have 640mb ram on a 2.0ghz P4.

^^This stuff look good?

Do I need to keep 5gb for linux or can I make it smaller than that?

It seems okay to me. The Linux programs you want to install, will be installed on the /root partition. /home is for your personal files e.g documents and other settings. Like I said in my earlier post try and read up on The UNIX directory structure so that you know wht folders you are likely to see on your system and what they will contain.

there is a bug with doing a duel boot with fc2 and xp pro. if you try and duel boot them it messes up the hard drive some how (not permanent) . i got around it by installing rh 9 then installing fc2 with the same partitions used by rh 9. i cant find the original thread i read but this person had the same problem and got around it. http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...dora+duel+boot

After searching awhile I found this workaround....

http://lwn.net/Articles/86835/

Anyone know anything about it?

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