Partitioning for XP & Linux, How Much for What?

On Wed, 06 Oct 2004 07:43:56 -0500, chrisv wrote:

"Dave C." wrote:

After Windows XP is fully installed, tested, and running fine, THEN
install
linux. (I'd suggest Mandrake linux or redhat fedora)

You guys do know, of course, that the latest versions (2.6 kernel) of
Linux will render you Windows partition unbootable? This is well
documented. Happened to me with Fedora C2.

Of course, Windows will (intentionally) do the same to a
previously-installed Linux partition. So, basically, you're screwed
for dual-boot, unless you use same third-party boot manager (which I
regard as kludges).


You what? Since when? I've just installed Gentoo 2004.2 with 2.6, lilo &
no problems whatsoever. I don't see why the kernel should affect how the
boot works, since its not loaded until after you start booting linux.

Of course, since I haven't yet bothered to go google for it, could well be
talking outta my ass, so feel free to ignore me if thats the case.... :P

In comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage chrisv wrote:
"Dave C." wrote:

After Windows XP is fully installed, tested, and running fine, THEN install
linux. (I'd suggest Mandrake linux or redhat fedora)

You guys do know, of course, that the latest versions (2.6 kernel) of
Linux will render you Windows partition unbootable? This is well
documented. Happened to me with Fedora C2.

Huh? I have been using stock 2.6.x up to 2.6.9-rc2 without any
problem like this. Care to give a reference? Or is this just
a problem of Fedora?

Of course, Windows will (intentionally) do the same to a
previously-installed Linux partition.

Not if you create the installation partition with Linux. At least
I have done this successfully several times.

So, basically, you're screwed
for dual-boot, unless you use same third-party boot manager (which I
regard as kludges).

"Huh?" again: Lilo and Grub do the job without problem. And they
are not "third-party".

Arno
--
For email address: lastname AT tik DOT ee DOT ethz DOT ch
GnuPG: ID:1E25338F FP:0C30 5782 9D93 F785 E79C 0296 797F 6B50 1E25 338F
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws" - Tacitus

J. Clarke wrote:

If your primary OS is Windows XP and you just want to dink around with
Unix (note--Linux is just one flavor of Unix--if you can drive one flavor
of Unix you can generally figure out another one without too much
trouble) a little, then install Cygwin http://www.cygwin.com--you can
get a very good feel for it and at the same time use its capabilities in
conjunction
with Windows. If you want to go a little deeper, then pay Microsoft the
hundred bucks for Virtual PC and then install whatever flavor of Unix you
like on the virtual machine. Works far better than one would expect.


That is pretty much wrongheaded. The OP should just try Linux, and so
should you.


Next time you're tempted to spout off in this fashion, check headers first.
Want some ketchup for that foot?


Nah, but thanks for asking! :-)

Cygwin is good if you must run Windows, but the OP is able to install
and run Linux.

You want him to pay $100 (to Microsoft!) for Virtual PC and then pay
again for "whatever flavor of Unix you like"? I confess I don't know
what the options are in this regard. How much would you have him spend
for Unix (what "flavor"?) on top of Virtual PC?

I'd like to know what specific belief or assumption is making you come
up with these odd approaches. It sound like you don't want to reboot.

By the way, Linux is not Unix.

chrisv wrote:
"Dave C." wrote:


After Windows XP is fully installed, tested, and running fine, THEN install
linux. (I'd suggest Mandrake linux or redhat fedora)


You guys do know, of course, that the latest versions (2.6 kernel) of
Linux will render you Windows partition unbootable? This is well
documented. Happened to me with Fedora C2.

Hey that's funny, I've got XP, Fedora Core 2, and SUSE 9.1 (2.6 kernel)
all bootable on the same machine.

There has been a lot of advice posted in this thread, much of it about
things I don't understand too well. I can only tell you about MY
experiences.

Around January 2003 I built my pc. For various reasons, I was attracted
to Linux. I first loaded Mandrake onto my 40 g hd. Then I decided to try
SUSE, and loaded a couple of the 7 cds. Then I went to load XP pro. Keep
in mind I'm a complete beginner, and if the stuff doesn't tell me what
to do simply and explicitly, I'm lost.

When I started loading the XP cd, I got a prompt asking how much of the
hd was for Linux and how much for XP. I think this must have come from
Linux, as XP was not yet on board. I picked about 7gb for XP and 33 for
Linux. Thereafter, at startup, a simple menu always prompted my to chose
Linux or XP. Both seemed to coexist nicely. FWIW I generally was told
load L first, then XP, not the other way around, to make them happy
neighbors.

My Linux experience was mediocre. I found myself using XP exclusively
since it is so user friendly to a novice. Oh, my Linux DID work, but I
never got it to detect my Win-modem. Since I surf a lot, that's a
problem. Helpful suggestions to buy an external modem fell on deaf ears:
I was trying to save money! Some said there were drivers or other
software work-arounds for the problem, but for a novice, that wasn't
helpful.

Eventually, the Windows partition was 80% full, and IE bogged down to a
crawl. I found Mozilla, which still worked, but the Windows partition
was clearly filling up. Someone suggested I re-partition, with Partition
Magic. So I bought another program...

Although I got the PM loaded and it seemed to be working (There is a
special corner of Hell reserved for people who write software
instruction) I could never quite do what I wanted to do: expand the XP
and shrink the Linux. Finally I did the only thing I could think of: I
reloaded Windows. I tried to leave some room for Linux, but the system
was not agreeable. Or maybe I just gave up. (Anyone need a copy of PM?)

About Linux: I found it remarkable like Windows, to my superficial
perception, much as Mozilla and IE are superficially very similar.

About the Original Poster's questions: perhaps a Windows or a Linux
newsgroup would be a good place for these questions, but be careful.
Some of those groups are Civil Wars, not unlike what happens here when
you compare Intel and AMD.

Another useful hint: You can download all the Linux OS, but if you have
dial-up like me, that can be daunting for distros like SUSE (=7 cds.)
There is a cheap and effective alternative: There are numerous people on
eBay selling the distros for little more the the cost of postage. I
found a guy who shipped me SUSE and threw in the 3 cds of Mandrake for
$5 or $10. (Anyone want them cheap?)

"Matt" wrote:
"Dave C." wrote:

After Windows XP is fully installed, tested, and running fine,
THEN install linux. (I'd suggest Mandrake linux or redhat fedora)

You guys do know, of course, that the latest versions (2.6 kernel)
of Linux will render you Windows partition unbootable? This is
well documented. Happened to me with Fedora C2.

Hey that's funny, I've got XP, Fedora Core 2, and SUSE 9.1
(2.6 kernel) all bootable on the same machine.


Are all those OSes on the same hard disk?
Do you use WinXP's boot manager to do the selection,
or do you use a 3rd party boot manager (e.g. Boot Magic)?

*TimDaniels*

Matt wrote:

J. Clarke wrote:

If your primary OS is Windows XP and you just want to dink around with
Unix (note--Linux is just one flavor of Unix--if you can drive one
flavor of Unix you can generally figure out another one without too much
trouble) a little, then install Cygwin http://www.cygwin.com--you can
get a very good feel for it and at the same time use its capabilities in
conjunction
with Windows. If you want to go a little deeper, then pay Microsoft the
hundred bucks for Virtual PC and then install whatever flavor of Unix
you
like on the virtual machine. Works far better than one would expect.


That is pretty much wrongheaded. The OP should just try Linux, and so
should you.


Next time you're tempted to spout off in this fashion, check headers
first. Want some ketchup for that foot?


Nah, but thanks for asking! :-)

Cygwin is good if you must run Windows, but the OP is able to install
and run Linux.

Yes, he is, and that might be the most attractive alternative for him, but
just because he can doesn't mean that doing so is the most desirable
alternative for him.

You want him to pay $100 (to Microsoft!) for Virtual PC and then pay
again for "whatever flavor of Unix you like"? I confess I don't know
what the options are in this regard. How much would you have him spend
for Unix (what "flavor"?) on top of Virtual PC?

The only major Unix variants that are not available under an open license
are Solaris and SCO System V. NetBSD, OpenBSD, and Linux are all
open-source and available at no charge. Personally I'm partial to Gentoo
Linux, but others have other preferences.

I'd like to know what specific belief or assumption is making you come
up with these odd approaches. It sound like you don't want to reboot.

I don't find it an "odd approach" at all. If you come from the mainframe
world the use of virtual machines is SOP--it's very, very old technology,
commercially available since the late '60s or early '70s. If you've never
used one you might want to try it. Personally I find the notion that you
must reboot to run a different OS on a machine that was designed to support
virtual operation is the "odd approach". The use of a virtual machine is
_much_ more convenient that repeated rebooting. Yes, there's a performance
penalty, but if you're doing something that critical it should have a
dedicated machine anyway.

By the way, Linux is not Unix.

By what reasoning? If you mean that it can't legally be called that as a
brand name because SCO owns the brand, that is true, but that is also true
of Solaris, NetBSD, and FreeBSD among others. If you mean that the code is
not derived from AT&T source, that is also true but again the same is true
of NetBSD and FreeBSD, both of which were sanitized so as to allow them to
be made open-source. Now, you may think that NetBSD and FreeBSD are also
not Unix, but in that case you are most assuredly in the minority. If you
mean that it's not good enough for production use, IBM is providing it as
an alternative on their mainframes, either natively or under VM. If it
wasn't ready for prime time businesses wouldn't be putting it on
multimillion dollar hardware.

--
--John
Reply to jclarke at ae tee tee global dot net
(was jclarke at eye bee em dot net)

In comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage Timothy Daniels wrote:
"Matt" wrote:
"Dave C." wrote:

After Windows XP is fully installed, tested, and running fine,
THEN install linux. (I'd suggest Mandrake linux or redhat fedora)

You guys do know, of course, that the latest versions (2.6 kernel)
of Linux will render you Windows partition unbootable? This is
well documented. Happened to me with Fedora C2.

Hey that's funny, I've got XP, Fedora Core 2, and SUSE 9.1
(2.6 kernel) all bootable on the same machine.


Are all those OSes on the same hard disk?
Do you use WinXP's boot manager to do the selection,
or do you use a 3rd party boot manager (e.g. Boot Magic)?

What about using a bootmanager from Linux (in the widest sense)?
The bootmanager form XP is perhaps the worst choice possible.

Grub or LILO can boot XP just fine. And yes, I have XP and
Linux on the same disk in my laptop, and have a linux recovery
system on the first disk in my desktop, were also XP is on the
same disk. The main Linux system in on RAID1 and only half on
the first disk...

Arno
--
For email address: lastname AT tik DOT ee DOT ethz DOT ch
GnuPG: ID:1E25338F FP:0C30 5782 9D93 F785 E79C 0296 797F 6B50 1E25 338F
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws" - Tacitus

Timothy Daniels wrote:
"Matt" wrote:

"Dave C." wrote:

After Windows XP is fully installed, tested, and running fine,
THEN install linux. (I'd suggest Mandrake linux or redhat fedora)


You guys do know, of course, that the latest versions (2.6 kernel)
of Linux will render you Windows partition unbootable? This is
well documented. Happened to me with Fedora C2.


Hey that's funny, I've got XP, Fedora Core 2, and SUSE 9.1
(2.6 kernel) all bootable on the same machine.



Are all those OSes on the same hard disk?

XP on the first disk. FC2, SUSE, and FreeBSD on the second disk.

Do you use WinXP's boot manager to do the selection,
or do you use a 3rd party boot manager (e.g. Boot Magic)?

I use GRUB (Grand Unified Boot Loader) on the MBR of the first disk so
that it points to a grub.conf file in the /boot directory of the FC2
installation. That grub.conf is a specification of a boot menu and of
the locations of the several OSes. I find GRUB's documents easier than
LILO's, and LILO is partly deprecated.

J. Clarke wrote:
Matt wrote:

You want him to pay $100 (to Microsoft!) for Virtual PC and then pay
again for "whatever flavor of Unix you like"? I confess I don't know
what the options are in this regard. How much would you have him spend
for Unix (what "flavor"?) on top of Virtual PC?


The only major Unix variants that are not available under an open license
are Solaris and SCO System V. NetBSD, OpenBSD, and Linux are all
open-source and available at no charge. Personally I'm partial to Gentoo
Linux, but others have other preferences.


I'd like to know what specific belief or assumption is making you come
up with these odd approaches. It sound like you don't want to reboot.


I don't find it an "odd approach" at all. If you come from the mainframe
world the use of virtual machines is SOP--it's very, very old technology,
commercially available since the late '60s or early '70s. If you've never
used one you might want to try it. Personally I find the notion that you
must reboot to run a different OS on a machine that was designed to support
virtual operation is the "odd approach". The use of a virtual machine is
_much_ more convenient that repeated rebooting. Yes, there's a performance
penalty, but if you're doing something that critical it should have a
dedicated machine anyway.

Okay, so you are saying that XP runs a process that emulates an i386
processor and the other PC hardware? Then you just run the binaries
from an ordinary *nix distro? Or do you run a distro made especially
for the virtual machine? If it is an ordinary distro, I don't know how
you would install the system.