how to setup my dual boot?

[romeoagogo]

Hi, I just got a new thinkpad x31 and it has a 40gig HD. I have windows and norton installed and fully patched and everything just how I want it. Now I just got a 60gig from my friend and setup a 5gig partition for Ubuntu on it. My question is 2 parts. 1) Can I somehow transfer my windows XP install from my 40gig to my 60 gig w/o hooking up both hard drives? 2) Can I somehow shrink my 40gig windows partition down to like 5? This way I can have 5gig linux partition 10gig for Windows and games/apps and then set aside 45 for storage. I know for the storage to be accessible by both nix and windows it has to be (I believe) FAT32 but I think also read something about not being able to format FAT32 drives over 30 gigs? I am sure there are tons of different methods for accomplishing this but I really dont know where to start besides doing a fresh install of linux/windows on the 60 which I would like to avoid.
thanks

 

[defuseme2k]

you really need a laptop hard drive adapter to plug it into a normal pc to transfer the windows install over to the other drive. As far as dual booting goes there are tons of options. You can use ntloader to boot to your ubuntu partition. It just takes time and reading. I suggest combing over the ubuntu forums. www.ubuntuforums.org that should help you find out how to use ntloader if you want to go that route. I personally do not like using grub or lilo to be loaded into the mbr of the drive containing windows. I'd prefer to have linux on a seperate drive if I'm going to do that, so it can be loaded into the mbr on that drive, and I can simply switch my boot order back and forth in the bios.

Its all how you want it to be, as far as dual booting goes.

HAVING to have fat32 to be accessible from linux is false. Linux can read ntfs just fine, but its not very safe to be writing. I've had plenty of luck with reading ntfs, so I can play back my mp3s and such. my pr0n of course

 

[Fark_Maniac]

why dual boot?

www.vmware.com