Dual booting vista sp2 and mandriva or fedora linux

onzlo

Hi all,
I have tested both fedora and mandriva linux on live cd and was wondering what would be the concequences of dual booting vista and one of these would be? And which os would be better for a total noob like myself?

ethernet

No problems doing that at all -- they individual OSes won't interfere with each other. Either Fedora or Mandriva is a great choice.

onzlo

ok thanks. would it be better if i put them of different partitions?
and does the dual boot come up automaticly?

ak27

Yeah, you will need seperate partitions for windows and linux, they use different filesystems. For linux, I'd recommend using ext3 as the filesystem. You'll also need to create a swap partition for linux, ideally the swap partition should be double your RAM.

When you boot your computer, you'll get the option of booting one or the other via a bootloader. Most linux distros these days use grub to do this job.

onzlo

ak27 wrote: »

Yeah, you will need seperate partitions for windows and linux, they use different filesystems. For linux, I'd recommend using ext3 as the filesystem. You'll also need to create a swap partition for linux, ideally the swap partition should be double your RAM.

When you boot your computer, you'll get the option of booting one or the other via a bootloader. Most linux distros these days use grub to do this job.

ok thanks. how do set the ext3 file system? and the swap system?
thanks for the help

ak27

You'll need a partition editor to do it. I haven't used Vista too much so I don't know what the partition editor is like on that. When I used XP, I found Acronis Disk Director Suite about the easiest to use but that's paid software. Pretty much all live cds have gparted on them for partitioning your disk.

If you have any external hard drives or media cards that contain files you don't want to loose, make sure you don't have them plugged in to the computer while your editing the partitions. I've accidently wiped my external harddrive before doing this. Also, backup anything on your windows partition that you don't want to loose just in case anything happens.

Once you have the partition editor running, the first thing you'll need to do is resize one of your other partitions. The partition Vista is on will usually contain the most space, so in all liklihood, you'll take some space off of this one. It's up to you how much space you want for ext3 partition. Personaly, I use 20GB for my ext3, but you can use more or less than that if you like.

Depending on how your disk is already partitioned, you may only be able to create one more parition on your drive, (there's a limit of 4 primary partitions for some odd reason) if this happens, create an extended partition which you can then divide up into a swap and ext3 partition.

An Fear Aniar

onzlo wrote: »

ok thanks. how do set the ext3 file system? and the swap system?
thanks for the help

You do that during the installation. If you have already got Vista on there, do the partitioning within Vista, just make a note of the partition names e.g. sda2, sda3 etc.

Have a look through some guides like this:

http://apcmag.com/how_to_dualboot_vista_with_linux_vista_installed_first.htm

so that you get an idea of what to expect.

.

onzlo

oh yea i forgot about linux mint is that any good?

ak27

I've tried it before and it seems quite good. You get flash and a few other codecs pre-installed which makes it easier for people who are new to linux.