XP & Fedora on laptop

[lugos]

Hello,

I have an Averatec laptop with an 80GB hard drive and Windows XP on it. I would like to know if it's possible to partition the drive into two drives (I guess one would be logical) so that I could install Fedora on the second partition, and enable dual boot. I have done this on my PC, but it was a PC that I put together. I formatted the hard drive, partitioned it, installed the OS myself, etc. However, because I didn't do any of that on my laptop, everything is pre-configured, and all I have is the system recovery disk; I'm not sure if it's possible for me to do it with my laptop.

Please forgive me if I sound ignorant, I am learning as I go.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

lugos

[kilgoretrout]

Yes it's possible. The procedure would be to shrink your existing windows partition which will leave some unallocated space then create a linux and a swap partition on the unallocated space. The whole procedure goes a lot easier if you have some good partitioning tools like PM or Acronis Disk Director but you can do all of the above with the Fedora install program IIRC. Regardless of which partitioning tool you use, resizing a partition is the riskiest operation performed by partitioning tools; back up your data before trying this. I don't mean to scare you off as the probability of running into problems is small but backing up is the prudent thing to do.

[lugos]

Hello,

Thanks for the information. Is using the Fedora install program IIRC as reliable as using a third-party software tool like PM or Disk Director? What would you recommend. I'd like to avoid purchasing a third-party partitioning tool that I would probably only use once or twice.

[kilgoretrout]

I haven't used RH since back in the RH9 days so I can't comment on the fedora installer. I believe most of the main,modern linux distro installers can resize NTFS which is the main stumbling block for most people. However, if your interested in experimenting with linux on an ongoing basis, investing in a good third party partitioning tool is worth the investment. The best tool IMHO is Acronis Disk Director. It has excellent linux suport, much better than PM, and I believe it's cheaper. I use it almost exclusively and I'm very familiar with linux so I could use the native linux partitioning tools. However, if you are only going to use it once or twice, I don't think it's worth the investment.
If you just want to see what linux is like and what all the fuss is about, I'd recommend getting a linux livecd instead of doing a hard drive install. These are bootable cds that run entirely in ram and write nothing to your hard drive so you don't have to fuss with partitioning at all. Here is a very nice one called PCLOS:

http://on-disk.com/product_info.php/products_id/69

You can give linux a good test drive with a livecd and check for any hardware compatiblility issues without commiting to an install. A nice side benefit of PCLOS is it has a nice graphical partitioning tool in its "Control Center" which you can use for doing your partitioning if you want to do a hard drive install and it's all free.
There are many other livecds as well if you want to try some others, kanotix, knoppix, ubuntu, mepis, just to name a few. I mention PCLOS first because of that nice partitioning tool which is derived from the mandriva distro on which PCLOS is based.

[lugos]

Hello,

Thanks again for the info. I will go ahead and download PCLOS when I get home tonight. So, just so that I understand, I can use its partitioning tool to resize the XP partition? Because what I want to do is resize it so that it uses only 40GB of the hard drive, and then use the other 40GB for Fedora or Ubuntu (I haven't decided yet).

lugos

[lugos]

I was leaning towards purchasing Disk Director, and now with your recommendation I have decided on that one over Partition Magic. However, I'd like to at least delay the purchasing of a partitioning tool, simply because I probably won't be getting too involved in the immediate future.

lugos

[kilgoretrout]

You can resize NTFS with the PCLOS tool. Here are the steps:

1. Boot up the cd and when you get to the login screen select "root". The password is also "root";

2. Go to the start menu>Configure>PCLOS Control Center;

3. That will bring up the Control Center(CC) program which is like a centralized configuration utility. In CC go to Mount Points>Configure local hard disk partitions;

4. That will bring up a graphical display of your hard drive. Click on the partition you want to resize then hit the "Resize" button. It will take several minutes to make calculations on the partition, warn you more than once about the dangers of resizing and that you should back up your data first and ultimately present you with a window with a slider where you can set the size for your partition that you want.