2 OSs on the one HD

HighlyCooL

i have been wanting to put windows and linix/unix on the one hd. i am running windows xp home but i want to beable to start the computer so that windows will load stright away and if i want to us linix/unix that i cand just press a key for the option to boot windows or linix/unix. is this do-able?

SkepticOne

Yes. Most (if not all) distributions will have options to install linux alongside some other OS on one HD. When you boot the computer a boot manager askes you which OS you want.

HighlyCooL

yeah but can i get it to go stright on to XP and if i want to start linux or unix i press a key when i start up my computer so it brings me in to boot manager

Narcom

HighlyCooL wrote:

yeah but can i get it to go stright on to XP and if i want to start linux or unix i press a key when i start up my computer so it brings me in to boot manager

Short answer is yes. If you install any of the flavours of linux - SUSE, Mandrake, RHat etc, then one of the things that the installation process will configure is how you want to boot the machine and into what OS.

Usually you can choose to allow the boot loader to run off the hard disk (where it will give you the option of which OS to boot) or off a floppy. So if the floppy is in the drive at bootup, it will go directly into linux, if not then it defaults to windows.

Also, if the loader is running off the hard disk, then you can get it to default to go into windows unless you interupt the lilo/grub screen. These loaders can be configured to give you 1-100 seconds to choose before they count down and go into the default OS (which in your case may be win)

If you have 98, NT, W2k, XP, Linux on various partitions then it will allow you to select whichever OS you want so that multiple OS's can exist on the one drive.

HighlyCooL

what would you say would be a good copy of linux to good with for doing this

aidan_walsh

Given that you've never used Linux before, I suggest you start here. Its actually pretty accurate at picking out the best distro for you to start with. It pegged me and a few others I know almost perfectly.

Fionn

if you want to be able to dual boot two different OS's like Win or Linux yes you can, as others have responded.
I would advise that if you have anthing important on your PC make sure it's backed up...just in case!
lilo or grub may thrash your MBR (Master Boot Record) for windows and what might happen is windows won't boot!

apparently it doesn't effect every system, however there are various fixes for it.......do the research first before you dive right in!! be prepared..


good luck!

Capt'n Midnight

Must get a sticky for this.

If XP is FAT32 - unlikely for lock in reasons then Knoppix bootable CD can have it's swap file and home folder in a file on the HDD. You can even do a poor man's install of Knoppix and boot off a file on the HDD if you can boot into MsDos mode. - or you could just try the bootable CD by itself to see if you like it.


If it's all one NTFS partiton you have to resize to allow some room for linux partitions. Defrag / Backup your files, (use Ntbackup / NTBACKUP.MSI on the XP home cd if necessary) and make repair disk. boot off knoppix and export the MBR.

[edit] - yeah that fill up the floppy / usb key
dd if=/dev/hda1 of=/mnt/sda1/mbr.bak bs=512 count=1
512 bytes for MBR and partition table
446 as below for just the MBR - better to backup both
you can restore one or the other later on if needed
man gpart for more info
[/edit]


Now you can use ntfsresize or qptarted option for ntfsresize tool to resize the NTFS partiton. Then reboot to make sure all is well.

Then back in to knoppix and qtparted to make a ~3GB linux partition and a ~500MB swap partition and then you can install it (can't remember the command - have posted in unix before - see notes on fdisk / sfdisk /gpart on hdd geometry in case it changes the CHS settings of the drive. )

tomk

Capt'n Midnight wrote:

boot off knoppix and export the MBR.
dd if=/dev/hda1 of=/mnt/sda1/mbr.bak

A small correction, Capt'n, if that's OK with you.

The entry you have given above will copy the contents of the first partition on the primary hard drive to a file called mbr.bak on whatever device is mounted on /mnt/sda1. It will not include the MBR.

To copy the MBR only, unmount all partitions on /dev/hda, and make the following entry:

dd if=/dev/hda of=/mnt/sda1/mbr.bak bs=446 count=1

This will copy the first 446 bytes (the size of the MBR) from the primary hard drive to the mbr.bak file.