dual-booting

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r_a_s88

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jan 7, 2004
Messages
426
If I were to get a second hard drive, would I have to still set them for dual-booting or could I just decide to log off of winxp and go into linux on just the other hard drive?
 
I dunno waht you mean by "Log off winxp and go into linux"

But yes, you have to dual-boot.
 
could I have windows XP assigned to one hard drive and Linux assigned to the other?
 
you can't just switch. you have to reboot. and yes, you want them on seperate hard drives. (You can't have both os's on the same hdds..well maybe you could, but I think it would be really really ugly)
 
Originally posted by defcom_1
(You can't have both os's on the same hdds..well maybe you could, but I think it would be really really ugly)
Click to expand...

Yes you can, and it is very simple.
 
/defcom_1 smacks himself.
I was thinking single partition. Yes, you can install on 1 HDD, and yes, it's quite simple.
 
ok. hard drive 1. this had windows on it now, and works, and is set to bootable
new hard drive 2. this you'll partition and install linux onto, probably with the structure of
Code: 
/boot (the boot drive - will hold the boot loader and kernel(s))
swap 
/ (your system files)
/home (your personal files)

your best bet would be to clean the MBR (boot up with any fdisk utility and run fdisk /mbr) - then install either lilo or grub to hard drive 2's /boot partition. in your bios, set the first bootable device to be HDD-2 (assuming hard drive2 is primary channel slave). now, you'll boot up to lilo or grub promt, which will give yuo the choice of windows or linux.
 
On harddrive 2 you can set it up so its like this:

/dev/hdb1 would be your /boot partition (about 32MB)
/dev/hdb2 would be your swap partition (about the size of your RAM)
and
/dev/hdb3 would be your / (root) partition where everything else goes.


Thats the most basic setup. You can also split it into further partitions for /home annd things like that.
 
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