Hi!
I just got this Linux book and it comes with Red Hat 6.1
It says its possible to both have Windows and Redhat on the same machine. I was wondering How would I come about having it a double boot???

Any help is great!

Chris

Originally posted by creid
Hi!
I just got this Linux book and it comes with Red Hat 6.1
It says its possible to both have Windows and Redhat on the same machine. I was wondering How would I come about having it a double boot???


Use vmware. http://www.vmware.com

creid,

1. Create a partition for windows.
2. Install windows on that partition.
3. Put in your Red Hat CD, and use Disk druid to create a linux partition from the allocated space that is left (don't forget to create small parition for swap space, so you'd have to linux partitions).
4. Configure LILO to desplay to option of operating systems. If you use KDE, then go to kontrol panel and click on Booting.

Keep reading the book, and it will tell you how to do it in details (I hope).

Originally posted by Palm

Keep reading the book, and it will tell you how to do it in details (I hope).

No it doesnt :(

:D

Chris

What version of Windows are you using? I.e., does it have a boot manager? NT does, for example, so you can create a file to copy to your Windows system (tiny file) and it'll launch that file and boot you into Linux. Or, you can use LILO to boot into Windows or Linux. Either way is fine. Basically, this just saves you from using a boot floppy or to not be able to use LILO. I have many OS's on each of my drives that I boot into from my Windows NT bootloader, for example. Different dists and versions of Linux, FreeBSD, or whatever. It all depends on how you want to do it.

I currently have a dual boot system... Win2k and RedHat 7.2 ;)

I heard Mandrake makes it fairly easy to allow you to dual boot an originally windows machine...but then again, i installed redhat 7.2 without a problem in the dual boot fashion.

you need at least two partitions on your harddrive, if this is a fresh harddrive or you're going to format your harddrive, i'd suggest installing windows-whatever first.

then boot with the redhat 7.2 or other distribution cd and make sure that it installs in the partition without windows on it... arg, i don't remember which one I chose, but the helpful text on the left side of a installer explained it if i was installing it as a second OS etc... so read that when they ask you about the master boot record.

now when i boot my comp up, it gives me a redhat menu that lets me choose between windows or redhat ;)

good luck!

edit:
i also recommend trying to download or get the latest version of redhat (7.2), it fixed alot of problems that i had before on 6.2 and 7.1 :)

This is the crapy part!
Im running Windows 98
but my computer is a Compaq. All i got was some sort of restore disk. I dont actually have the Windows CD rom.
Anything I can do here?(I am willing to do a full re-install if it is neccisary)

Chris

Well it's not free, but I run system commander (http://www.v-com.com/) and I love it. You can boot to dozens of os'es if you like.

Frank

I tried that and WinXP still took over my machine... talk about monopoly jeeez:eek:

Yes, you'll definitely want to install Windows first. The best thing to do, is backup what you want and/or need, format it all and grab a floppy nd maybe disk druid or better yet, partition magic would be better for beginners, (but there's no reason why you can't use fdisk that comes with Linux to do all of this) and figure out how many OS's you want, how many partitions, etc. and split them all up accordingly. Plan ahead if you have the free disk space -- and you shouldn't need too much, depending. I have about 26 partitions across two drives on one of my systems. I gave Windows NT a few partitions, and then created a few main partitions to break up later, and I assigned another with double the size of my physical memory for the swap drive (you might not even need swap, if you have a decent amount of memory, but it's not large enough to matter and it's better to have just in case you want or need to use it), and I created two swap partitions (again, each double the size of my RAM -- that's the best size, don't go over that, unless you plan to add more RAM at some point -- it'll be a waste of disk space and actually end up chewing on your drive when you have too much of a load anyway, and that does no good to anyone or the system -- if you need that much more swap, you have another problem or way too little RAM -- i.e., don't do the ignorant thing and add a GIG or 2 gig swap and just do more harm than good). The reason you create two (or more, if you want) partitions, over one (all you need is one), is so if you actually ever did need more swap, it's better performance to use different areas of the drive.. but I've never seen anyone need to do that in the last 7+ years. Also, if you end up running say, Linux Slackware and Linux redhat, and a 4th OS, say Linux SuSE, you can use that same swap partition for all of them (again, planning ahead) and save space. There's no reason to have 5 swap partitions, just because you have 5 Linux dists on the drive (if you end up with that many), for example.

Then, break up the Linux file systems into different partitions. You don't have to and you can install it all to one root partition, but that's a bad idea for many reasons, two immediate one's being, poor security of the file system layout and the other is if your partition table ever screws up or your drive frags, you'll not lose everything. Again, plan this out and add different partitions, based on good logic (make sure you have enough) for /, /boot, /tmp, /usr, /var and /home. Here's an example of a good way to break up the drive percentages from a server I set up (again, for reasons mentioned above that I won't bother getting into right now, especially all the security aspects to doing this). It could be better, but this is pretty close to what you want percentage wise to make sure it's a good layout:

[root@me]# df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda5 594M 326M 238M 58% /
/dev/hda1 53M 5.7M 45M 11% /boot
/dev/hda2 243M 2.0k 230M 0% /tmp
/dev/hda6 2.0G 725M 1.2G 38% /usr
/dev/hda7 2.0G 565M 1.3G 29% /var
/dev/hda8 8.7G 2.5G 5.8G 30% /home


You can always mount another drive if you need more room, or just put symbolic links to another partition, etc., so don't worry too much about it, once you have a good layout down. Keep in mind, that this is determined by what you'll be installing on it as well. Again, plan ahead, so you can get the most out of the space and have it set up like a well planned server setup -- or even network system or personal box. I personally always emulate a server setup, so your reasons and choices may vary.

Once you get the partitions all mapped out and create them, you can install Windows (first), if you haven't already (and it's fine to install Windows beforehand -- just be careful about the partitioning and don't bother to put anything important on the Windows partitions until after you've installed everything, or you might screw up and waste time doing more than reinstalling Windows :-). Win98 only recognizes 2 GIG or less partitions, doesn't it? I don't remember. If it doesn't, and even if it does it might be a good idea, you should have a C, D and E drive for Windows, I'd suggest, for the same reasons as you'd do for Linux or not losing everything if something goes awry, and also for some security reasons (especially if you used NFS, NTFS, etc.)

There's plenty of free tools you can use for a bootloader and Linux's LILO will work just fine. Your book should offer information in regards to how to specify the OS to load so you can set a prompt to boo into the OS of choice. I don't think on Win98, that you can copy over the file (copying the first few blocks of the root on Linux into a file) to boot off of in Windows (98), but you might be able to and just create a OS selector on boot without any problem if you now how to create a menu (it's easy to do). This can get sort of complex to try and explain, unless I literally tried to go step by step in my head, but I haven't used Win98 for a while and forgot exactly what I did. I suppose you can always jut boot from a floppy if you want to get into Linux, which is the easy, default way, if you're not sure or able to do a boot menu option, but I think you'll be able to manage to do that though.

Hi Chris,
Here is a simple way of doing this.
Take for redhat cd and go to the dosutils directory. This is a program called fips. Use it to resize the partition of your windows drive.
Now you'd have some free space. Now reboot with the CD and install redhat. The installation would search and find the windows partion and add it to the bootloader (lilo or grub).

I hope this helps.

have a great day :)

regards
amar

Originally posted by bobcares
Hi Chris,
Here is a simple way of doing this.
Take for redhat cd and go to the dosutils directory. This is a program called fips. Use it to resize the partition of your windows drive.
Now you'd have some free space. Now reboot with the CD and install redhat. The installation would search and find the windows partion and add it to the bootloader (lilo or grub).

I hope this helps.

have a great day :)

regards
amar

It's considerably more complex than that, and I would not recommend fips for someone that's not familiar with the steps involved. Further, if fips is used, be sure to back up all your important data, because this can have adverse effects on your data when it breaks apart the main partition to create any new ones. Moreover, I don't think fips works with certain FAT partitions, and I am not certain, but Win98's fat32 might be the one it has problems with. In fact, it's best to get your information from a book, that will explain the process step by step, or you risk thinking it's so simple and destroying your partition table and all your data.

Thanks Tim!:) (And Everyone Else!)
This helped me a lot!

Chris