[Novalug] Insalling partition for other O/S after installing Windoze XP

[Karl Pena]

Hi Jim,

I think the answers are yes, yes, and also, yes. I've seen this work many
times when using Ubuntu, gparted, and Grub.

Feel free to email me directly if you like this idea and have any
questions, I'll try to help.

* backup all your important data, b/c there is always an element of risk
involved (prepare for the worst, hope for the best) *

Like Mike Bower said in a recent post to your thread, it is easier if you
are installing a GNU/Linux distribution onto a drive that already boots to
the alternate pre-existing OS. Alan McConnell's comments were quite
well-guided as well.  =)

Here I will offer some instructions for preparing what you need using the
latest Ubuntu 6.06 distribution, but the process is similar for ANY other
distribution, which offers a very controllable amount of partitioning
customiziation during install time.

As you get ready to take the plunge, it is easiest if you know what space
is free on your drive(s) and if it were contiguous free space. For example
it is super easy if you have a 40gb drive and you have the alternate OS on
the first 20GB, and free space on the remaining 20GB.

So first, do some kind of a "disk defrag" before the process, to free up
as much space as possible on your drive.

Next you may want to define the space to be assigned to GNU/Linux OS using
gparted, and resizing the pre-existing OS partition as needed. (There is
also qtparted, and fdisk and cfdisk of course. But gparted is apple-pie.)

Basically Jim, you just need to have [a recommended 2GB or more] on that
second drive, as much as you plan to use. Then free the space to use for
GNU/Linux and re-assign the partition as ext3 -- so that the installation
of Ubuntu recognizes it without fuss and you can just manually choose your
partitions within the usable space, and with less fear of touching the
alternate OS data, when you hit the big "go" button.

You can use gparted, or any tool that lets you visually manipulate
partitions. A very easy way is to insert an Ubuntu live-cd to boot up into
RAM (and then sudo-ing to root with the default empty password), and then
running "gparted" which is very intuitive and powerful.

It should be easy to figure out how much space of the drive to you want to
use for this installation. Use gparted to make sure that space is
available, and slice up your drive(s). That's it, once you have reserved
the space for the new installation, you can reboot and start the
installation from the CD. This assumes you backed up all your data already
and wrote down prior partition information in case you need to recover,
and it assumes you can figure out how to use gparted for your specific
case of two hard-drives.

MBR stuff... When a co-worker recently installed Ubuntu in addition to
their other OS, it asked where to install it, and then it modified the MBR
and installed Grub. From that Ubuntu install Grub automatically knew where
the alternate OS resided and even included it in the options list at boot
time. Very easy.

That's why it seemed suitable to recommend Ubuntu with gparted and grub to
take this plunge.


This is just a starting point, sorry if I spelled anything out to
basically, or not enough, for you, man.


Good luck,
Karl


On Wed, 8 Nov 2006, James Darlack wrote:

> Hi LUGnuts,
>
> Im enjoying the email regarding Linux.  I have been
> away from the joy of Linux for a while, but now Im
> back, and loving it.
>
> I have an HP recent vintage laptop with XP installed.
> It has dual 100 gig hard drives.  Im interested in
> making it dual boot with Linux running on it.
>
> The questions are, can I install Linux to run in it
> now, after XP was installed??
>
> Can I run Linux from the second hard drive, which is
> more for data storage?
>
> Can I install Linux and expect that XP will not be
> effected?  There isnt that much on my XP, however, I
> dont want to re-install it all unless I have to.
>
> Thanks,
> Jim
>
>
>
>
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