Re: [Sheflug] Ultimate dual booting guide

[Chris Warburton <chriswarbo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, 2007-07-06 at 14:16 +0100, Lesley Binks wrote:
> I have XP installed all over one laptop drive and would like to get 
> Linux on there too.  I've never dual booted without making sure I have 
> the required partitions already set up and I do not want to lose my XP 
> set up.  It's also been a few years since I last dual booted.
> 
> I could sit down and repartition and reinstall or buy a partitioning 
> ssoftware but this set of articles appears to claim that Ubuntu can do 
> the partitioning for you.
> 
> My question is how reliable is the Ubuntu partitioning software?  Will 
> it preserve the XP install or will it make it unbootable or wreck the data?
> 
> Before anyone says - go make an XP rescue disk - I don't have a floppy 
> drive on the laptop.
> 
> Regards
> 
> L.
I have always found installing Linux after XP in a dual boot setup to
work fine, although this is obviously not proof (but I have done it a
lot). Every sane person who knows how to setup dual-boot will tell you
to install Windows first then Linux, since Linux plays nice and finds
any Windows OSs already installed, whereas Windows barges ahead and
wipes over whatever boot system is there, making any Linux partitions
inaccessible without reinstalling GRUB over the Windows bootloader (but
it does let you boot other Windows installations IIRC).

I have not used Ubuntu's partitioner (the GParted embedded in Ubuntu's
Ubiquity installer) since I always set up my partitions with the full
GParted included on Ubuntu CDs (System>Administration>GNOME Partition
Editor) and then manually tell the installer how to treat each one. I
did let my girlfriend try and setup Ubuntu on her own (as a kind of
usability experiment, with me making sure no damage was done) and I
remember the Ubiquity-based partition resizing being rather confusing,
the language used for shrinking the Windows partition didn't make it
clear whether the given size would be the XP partition or the new Ubuntu
partition. I think we ended up doing it the wrong way around and had to
use GParted anyway to sort out the relative sizes after finishing the
installation.

So I would say this: If you know which partitions you need, etc. then
set them up with the CD before running the installer, then when
installing tell it you want to manually set each partition yourself. I
have never had a problem with this method.

Hope that helps,
Chris


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