On Friday 05 March 2004 11:12 pm, James W. Cooley wrote:
> Do the Mandrake and Red Hat Linux software packages permit a dual boot with
> Windows XP or 98? Jim Cooley

Jim:
Yes. In fact, because so many users do use dual boot setups, the Linux
installers will handle all of the messy details for you. A bit of warning: In
the event that you decide that linux is not your cup of tea, you will need to
restore the master boot record to remove the loader. To do this in Win98,
boot to a Windows boot disk and run fdisk /mbr. (I'm not sure how this is
done in XP.)

Some words of advice before you actually install Linux:
1. You may find that some of your hardware may not work in Linux, or it may be
difficult to configure, so you check out the hardware compatibility lists on
the distribution's home page. Another method of testing your hardware is to
get one of the Linux-on-a-CD distributions such as Knoppix or Mandrake Move.
Since they run from a CD-ROM, they will not affect your current Windows
installation but will allow you to experience Linux first hand, as well as
settling most questions about your hardware. (Bear in mind that these
distributions are very slow to open applications since they are getting them
from a CD rather than a hard drive.)

2. You also need to determine that you have sufficient empty space on your HD
-- 6 GB is nice but more is always better. When I first installed Linux five
years ago, I used Partition Magic to create the empty space, and then let the
Linux installer take care of creating and formatting the Linux partitions.
Since then, both Mandrake or RedHat have added the capability to modify at
least some Windows partitions.

3. While Linux can easily read and write to Windows FAT32 partitions (the
default for Win98), writing to NTFS partitions (the default format for XP) is
risky. If your XP installation uses NTFS, and you wish to exchange data
between Linux and XP, you should consider setting up a new FAT32 partition
for storing data that can be easily accessed from either OS.

4. When you get to the point of setting up your Linux partitions, be sure that
you format them with one of the journalling filesystems (ext3 or reiser), as
these will protect you from corrupting your system in the event of an
unexpected shutdown such as might be caused by a power failure or
accidentally hitting reset.

HTH,
Regards,
Carroll Grigsby

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