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Subject : Re: LUG: How to install Windows XP onto Linux machine

From : Brian Cottingham <spiffytech@gmail.[redacted]>

Date : Fri, 16 Apr 2010 16:53:00 -0400

Parent

When dual-booting, making space for Windows is only one part of the story- another important part is making the "dual" part of dual-boot actually work.

Short story is if you install Windows after you've installed Linux, Windows will overwrite your bootloader (GRUB) with it's own bootloader (which doesn't see your Linux install), leaving your Linux install inaccessible until you go reinstall GRUB.

This guide I found via the Google looks like it'll walk you through all the necessary steps to get your dual boot going. Assuming you're still going to do that even after the barrage of "Virtual machines!" emails.

http://apcmag.com/how_to_dualboot_vista_with_linux_linux_is_already_installed.htm

-Brian


On Fri, Apr 16, 2010 at 4:38 PM, Justin Parker < xjparkerx@gmail.[redacted] > wrote:
On 04/16/2010 02:43 PM, Daniel Underwood wrote: 
When using parted to resize a partition, do you lose the files on that
partition?  Even if you have more free space on that partition that the
amount by which you're resizing the partition?
Hello,

I don't quite understand this question but; almost all modern partition editors esp. those on a linux box should allow you to shrink or grow without causing data loss.  If it doesn't then I wouldn't use it.  Gparted is the graphical version of parted and is basically just a frontend for parted.  I've actually never lost data when doing a resize with gparted.  Even doing a resize on fat32 and NTFS.  However, backups are recommended because it only takes one screw up and your data is gone.   Better to be safe than sorry.   If I understand your original question you would actually shave off free space from the current home partition in order to create a new partition for the windows install.

Just curious, why not go the virtual machine route?  Virtualbox is a different beast than Parallels.  All the way down to different virtual drivers.  However, I wouldn't recommend any virtual machine option if you are planning on running some type of voip with video unless you have quite a bit of ram to give to the vm like 4 gigs or more and a beafy cpu.

I ran a dual boot system for a long time for work and it just got to be a real pain the rear having to shut down just to get to what I needed on the os I wasn't running at the time I needed to get to something.  That could be remedied with some type of network storage but then the question becomes,  did save everything I need before I reboot into the other os.  Now I'm running vm's of the work image and I used VMware converter to convert that image to a vm so I wouldn't lose anything like domain access or data by doing a whole new install.  Converter is pretty slick and Virtualbox now has support for using vmware virtual disks.

Hope this helps,
Justin