I am not sure how to setup a dual boot pc. In the past i have just had either linux or windows not both.

I assume a hard drive partition is necessary.

do i have to install linux first? Then windows? Or does it not matter?

Thanks,
Derrick

What O/S's do you want to have? The PC I'm working on right now has three - Solaris x86, Suse Linux and Win XP Pro.

The reason I ask is that some O/S's do not coexist together well. For example, some Linux distros wants to be more like Windows and take over the Solaris partion even if I tell it not to (Solaris x86 has the same file system type as Linux swap).

So for me I use a partion manager. Mine came from http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/ and is called BootIt. I do not work for them nor have any financial interest in them - I am a happy paying customer.

BootIt and others allow you to modify the size of your Windows partition to partition as you see fit. You do not have to reinstall Windows, though if you've never done it I really do encourage it just for the learning experience - it's pretty easy.

My advice, assuming you don't have anything particularly important on your Windows partition, is to make a boot floppy in Windows, download a partion/boot system (another good one is Partition Manager at http://www.ranish.com/part/ if you don't need to hide some partitions from some O/S's) and spend a few hours making mistakes. Yep, you'll get frustrated a few times. But you'll learn a ton too.

Hi,

It is recommended to install windows first and linux next. For windows, partition the hard disk using fdisk and leave one partition as raw, so that you can setup linux using partition tools such as disk druid and fdisk.

Regards,