Dual Booting Questions

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Wheaties466

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Oct 15, 2007
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In the near future I am planning on reformatting my hard drive and dual booting a version of windows and Linux, Most likely Ubuntu. Now my question is are there any programs that help with the dual booting or is there a thread on help about dual booting that someone could link me to?
 
The easiest thing I have found is to install your Windows OS first and then install your Linux OS. Your Linux OS should install GRUB as your bootloader and it will allow you to also boot into Windows.

I have an XP/Vista/openSUSE triple boot setup right now on my main rig with no trouble. I installed XP first, then Vista and finally openSUSE. Vista automatically found my XP install and added it into it's own bootloader. Then openSUSE found both Windows installations and added them as options to the GRUB bootloader menu. I think the only way to get into XP is to choose the Vista boot option through GRUB which starts the Vista bootloader at which point I can choose which MS OS I want to boot into.

Just remember to install each OS onto their own partitions. Otherwise, it will not work right. They can be on the same physical disk like all three of my OSes, but they have to have their own partitions.

My main drive is partitioned as 10 gig for XP, 20 gig for Vista, 15 gig for openSUSE, a 2 gig swap partition for Vista and a 2 gig swap partition for openSUSE. The rest of the drive is another partition and it's formatted as ext3 for my Linux storage. I have a separate drive that's formatted as ntfs which I can use for my MS storage.

I will eventually switch the ntfs formatted drive or at least the majority of it over to ext3 for native Linux storage as I rarely use the MS OSes. I do have read/write abilities no matter what OS or filesystem I'm using. openSUSE 10.3 has ntfs read/write support built in and I have software for XP and Vista which gives me read/write access to ext2 and ext3 filesystems. Well, I'm pretty sure I have read and write to ext2/ext3 in Windows. It's been a while since I've actually tried it.

At one point I had an XP/Vista/FC6/Ubuntu/openSUSE boot setup. Talk about a bunch of options in the GRUB menu for booting to different OSes. It also came off without a hitch since I had installed them in that order and GRUB picked up each OS even during the different Linux installations.

 
SmokeRngs said:
The easiest thing I have found is to install your Windows OS first and then install your Linux OS.
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It's as simple as that, no guides needed. Start with a blank drive, and install Vista to a portion of the drive. Leave the remaining space unformatted/unallocated. Then boot from your Ubuntu disc and have it partition the remainder of the drive for you. When it's done, you'll be given a boot menu.
 
if you do want to install vista later, what you can do is to get a copy of the Gparted live CD and set your other partition as hidden so that when vista installs, it won't rewrite the MBR. You would then have to add vista to GRUB, I'm pretty new with this stuff though so don't trust me haha
 
SmokeRngs said:
At one point I had an XP/Vista/FC6/Ubuntu/openSUSE boot setup. Talk about a bunch of options in the GRUB menu for booting to different OSes. It also came off without a hitch since I had installed them in that order and GRUB picked up each OS even during the different Linux installations.
Click to expand...

That's sick! I just bought me a Dell 1520 laptop with a 160GB HD and want to keep Vista on there and then throw on a couple different versions of Linux (Ubuntu 7.10 and Fedora 7). I'm thinking about creating 3 partitions; 100GB for Vista, 30GB for each version of Linux. Should work ok right?

I'm Linux noob, so I am still trying to understand the file structure for Linux. You have the MBR and then ext3 part for storage right? Do you need to create yet another partition for that or does GRUB do that for you during the Linux install?

Thanks in advance for any help.
 
gn0me said:
I'm thinking about creating 3 partitions; 100GB for Vista, 30GB for each version of Linux. Should work ok right?
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Virtually any distro will be able to accomodate that during installation.

I'm Linux noob, so I am still trying to understand the file structure for Linux. You have the MBR and then ext3 part for storage right?
Click to expand...
Standard PC disks have the MBR (the two major parts of which are the partition table and master boot code), and each partition has its own volume boot record. After the MBR code is run, control typically passes to the code in the VBR of the partition that is marked bootable in the partition table. The code in the VBR is what executes your bootloader.

Ext3 is a filesystem, and has nothing to do with your partitions beyond living inside of one.

Do you need to create yet another partition for that or does GRUB do that for you during the Linux install?
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Your distro's auto-installer should set up whatever partitions you need, unless you feel like manually partitioning beforehand. As for grub, it doesn't do anything like making partitions. It's just a bootloader. The partitioning stuff is handled by the distro installer. Also, grub doesn't configure itself; that is also done by the installer, or by you if you want to.

Personally, I would put grub on it's own small partition. But it's not a requirement.
 
Whether you install Windows first or linux first makes no difference because either way linux will overwrite the MBR that Windows installs.

If you use Grub which I highly recommend then it will help you install the boot entries for Windows AND Linux and set it up properly.

In regards to 30gb of space for linux thats a bit extreme unless you plan to keep a lot of data on that drive and even then 20gb is a lot for linux.

One thing you'll get a lot of people telling you is that with linux you want a fairly large swap file but with computers running more than 1 or 2gb of memory these days you don't even really need a swap but to be safe make a 256 or 512mb swap.
 
Bones said:
Virtually any distro will be able to accomodate that during installation.


Standard PC disks have the MBR (the two major parts of which are the partition table and master boot code), and each partition has its own volume boot record. After the MBR code is run, control typically passes to the code in the VBR of the partition that is marked bootable in the partition table. The code in the VBR is what executes your bootloader.

Ext3 is a filesystem, and has nothing to do with your partitions beyond living inside of one.


Your distro's auto-installer should set up whatever partitions you need, unless you feel like manually partitioning beforehand. As for grub, it doesn't do anything like making partitions. It's just a bootloader. The partitioning stuff is handled by the distro installer. Also, grub doesn't configure itself; that is also done by the installer, or by you if you want to.

Personally, I would put grub on it's own small partition. But it's not a requirement.
Click to expand...

firebane said:
Whether you install Windows first or linux first makes no difference because either way linux will overwrite the MBR that Windows installs.

If you use Grub which I highly recommend then it will help you install the boot entries for Windows AND Linux and set it up properly.

In regards to 30gb of space for linux thats a bit extreme unless you plan to keep a lot of data on that drive and even then 20gb is a lot for linux.

One thing you'll get a lot of people telling you is that with linux you want a fairly large swap file but with computers running more than 1 or 2gb of memory these days you don't even really need a swap but to be safe make a 256 or 512mb swap.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the info. I'll probably use 10 - 15 GB partitions for the Linux distros. I really want / need to learn Linux, so I'm looking forward to playing around with the different distros and learning the nuances of a few of them.
 
gn0me said:
Thanks for the info. I'll probably use 10 - 15 GB partitions for the Linux distros. I really want / need to learn Linux, so I'm looking forward to playing around with the different distros and learning the nuances of a few of them.
Click to expand...

Personally imho only 4 distros really only matter:

1) Ubuntu for the noobs
2) Debian for the novice
3) Slackware for the intermediate
4) Gentoo for the nerd
 
Wheaties466 said:
Where do Red hat and Fedora fit into this?
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They don't as Redhat is now commercial and no longer free and Fedora is based off of Redhat.

The list is what I consider the best to use after playing around in the linux area for over 10 years.
 
Wheaties466 said:
Where do Red hat and Fedora fit into this?
Click to expand...
It's just his opinion. I disagree with it, but I don't care enough to rebut it.

Whether you install Windows first or linux first makes no difference because either way linux will overwrite the MBR that Windows installs.
Click to expand...
That made no sense. Installing Windows first eliminates the need to fix the MBR for grub later on. It's a tiny amount of work saved.
 
firebane said:
They don't as Redhat is now commercial and no longer free and Fedora is based off of Redhat.
Click to expand...

Redhat was always "commercial". The source for RHEL is freely available because it is GPL licensed software. Anybody can download it and use it... that is how CentOS was born. RH support contracts, though, cost money. It's always been like that.
 
firebane said:
One thing you'll get a lot of people telling you is that with linux you want a fairly large swap file but with computers running more than 1 or 2gb of memory these days you don't even really need a swap but to be safe make a 256 or 512mb swap.
Click to expand...

I've only recently started using Linux (in the past year) and most of the distros I've used normally recommend around 2x your amount of RAM for the swap partition. In my case, I only have 1 gig of RAM and so I made a 2 gig swap partition. Unless I do something memory intensive, I usually don't even have to worry about anything being written to the swap. However, I think I've seen up to 1 gig of the swap partition in use before. However, I don't remember how many RAM intensive apps I was running at the time. All I know is that it was a lot including a game with a lot of other programs running in the background. This is also on my daily use system.

The size of the swap partition depends on how much RAM you have and what programs you use. Basically, it's the same thing as figuring out a static swap file size in Windows. If I had 2 gig of RAM with my usage, I would probably still keep a 2 gig swap partition. 2 gig isn't much considering I have more than a terabyte of storage overall so it's not like I'm losing a lot of space. But, I'm not using the 2x amount of RAM formula either. If I had 4 gig of RAM, I'd probably have a 1 gig swap partition, but I would never expect it to see any usage at all with the current software I'm running.

I also have a PIII 800 with 512 meg of RAM with a 2 gig swap partition. It's mainly just a file server but runs XP in VMware which is allowed 128 or 192 meg of RAM for XP usage as I have a couple of programs that run from that but they aren't memory intensive at all. Although I don't "use" that system on a regular basis, it rarely even touches the swap partition.

Something to remember for those thinking about having more than one Linux install on a machine is that you can use the same swap partition for all your Linux installs. When I had different Linux distros on this machine each disto used the same swap partition. There is no need to have separate swap partitions for the different distros.

 
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