Are You Scared of Dual Booting Linux? - Linux

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I’ve installed several desktop linux distros (i.e. ubuntu, PCLinuxOS, freespire, kubuntu) in multiboot mode using WindowsXP as the initial OS. All distros were installed from liveCDs and never had any problems.
Since I’ve been a PCLinuxOS user for several months now (not using the Windows partition at all), with the new Ubuntu release (i.e. 7.10) I’m attempting to multiboot windowsXP + Ubuntu + PCLinuxOS. Hope everything goes smoothly.

Don’t have any fear guys! dual-boot with confidence...

by jellykiller on Wednesday 24th of October 2007 at 17:54

Just download and install VMWare Server (which is FREE)... no need to dual boot!

by Anon on Sunday 9th of September 2007 at 08:39

I have been playing around with dual boot MS and Linux for about 10 years now and it has to be said that generally the problems have been few and far between. As others have said, I have had problems with resizing utilities, but gave up on that route a while back. Generally I tend to leave a block of unpartitioned space when installing windows, and linux has always found this and offered to install into it.
Newer distros have come on in leaps and bounds, so that it is now perfectly possible for novice users to install an os. Mandrake 10.2 is as esy to install as XP, many of my students have loaded this distro as their only os, so we’re getting there.
My advice would be, if you’re going to dual boot, get a second hard drive and install you chosen distro to that. If your going to resize, ghost the hard drive first, or at least take an image back up fist.

by marshon on Thursday 9th of August 2007 at 22:41

I’ve done duel boot with XP and PcLinux os the only problem I had was when I had to reinstall windows. PcLinux os and XP didn’t show up for duel boot. I had to get a live cd go into terminal and redo lilo. I also redid the partition for Linux. I duel boot when I restarted and all my files. I don’t know about what you would need to do with Grub though

by Flatline -^-^-^-^-------- on Tuesday 7th of November 2006 at 15:27

Must read HOWTOs.

There is a HOWTO on "Dual Booting, ie, installing windows XP/2000 on a spare partition with Linux." at

http://linux.coconia.net/
http://m.domaindlx.com/LinuxHelp/ (mirror)

There are also HOWTOs on:

1) Cloning your windows XP/2000 installations using Linux.
2) 3D acceleration for ATI cards (simple procedure, works for SuSE, Mandriva and Debian).
3) accessing and writing to Windows XP (formatted with the NTFS) from Linux.
4) some discussion on the GPL and non-free third party kernel modules.
5) remix those 14 Debian installation CDs as 2 DVDs.
6) compile the worlds best DVD/Movie/Video/MP3 Player and Encoder (MPlayer and MEncoder).
7) the entire book "Linux Device Drivers 3" in HTML format.
by Jade

by John on Friday 3rd of November 2006 at 18:40

There is a HOWTO on "Dual Booting, ie, installing windows XP/2000 on a spare partition with Linux." at

http://linux.coconia.net/
http://m.domaindlx.com/LinuxHelp/ (mirror)

There are also HOWTOs on:

1) Cloning your windows XP/2000 installations using Linux.
2) 3D acceleration for ATI cards (simple procedure, works for SuSE, Mandriva and Debian).
3) accessing and writing to Windows XP (formatted with the NTFS) from Linux.
4) some discussion on the GPL and non-free third party kernel modules.
5) remix those 14 Debian installation CDs as 2 DVDs.
6) compile the worlds best DVD/Movie/Video/MP3 Player and Encoder (MPlayer and MEncoder).
7) the entire book "Linux Device Drivers 3" in HTML format.

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by RosaLanna on Thursday 26th of October 2006 at 03:08

I dual booted XP Pro and Mandrake for about 6 months and then started actively testing various live cd options before finally removing XP from my box entirely. Go figure, the only MS product left in my house is on my kids’ computer that they use to play those annoying Flash games on the net. The only issues I had with dual booting at the time involved toasting the MBR when I had to reinstall XP after numerous crashes. It did not share or play well with others in that regard.

by rbrandnur on Tuesday 24th of October 2006 at 23:32

I am a conservative person. I will never go beyond Win2K+SP2, which I can install over and over from CD.

I never touch the partitions or other contents on the HD of my working system - I know how to use my screwdriver and connect an empty HD when setting up a new system.
In some cases I don’t even touch the working box but rather use another box to build the new system.

I plan the partitioning from scratch, then create all partitions initially empty using available partitioning functions on install floppies or CD’s

I install in the following order: DOS - Win - Linuxes and manually control the assignment of partitions to the systems.

When the newly installed systems are functional I might connect the retiring HD as a data disk to compare installations and copy pieces
Not until long after the new HD has shown colors and proven itself will I consider erasing its predecessor and have it available as a resource the next time again.

by Ingemar on Monday 23rd of October 2006 at 23:01

Actually, it’s perfectly doable to create a multiboot machine. I, for one, am perfectly able to run a mixture of Windows and different Linux distributions on the same computer. This process is perfectly repeatable and understandable, and becomes even more easier with time.

Just remember several simple rules:
* always remember to create copies of your hard disk’s MBR on a floppy (preferably formatted with FAT filesystem for greater compatibility)
* create enough partitions to hold your OS’s and data
* if you have only one NTFS partition, boot off LiveCD and use ntfsresize, calculator and fdisk wisely - to put it short: THINK!!!
* if partitions become clobbered, use testdisk to restore them to a healthy state
* if you intend to run Windows and Linux, install Windows first (that’s the best for this OS)
* if you prefer some specific boot loader to start all other systems, install the boot loader of each OS in the boot record of its partition and not in the MBR, then add them to the boot loader of your choice
* and the most important: do only one step at a time - to put it short: THINK!!!

Cheers,

by SirYes on Sunday 15th of October 2006 at 13:08

I have been dual-booting machines for about 5 years now, and rarely had aproblem. I am currently running Ubuntu Dapper & Vista-RC1 on my main machine, in the past it’s been XP & Beos, XP & SuSE....
The following is my advise for guaranteeing a happy dual-boot experience.

Personally, I would NOT trust any free partitioning software for resizing NTFS Windows partitions, as ive destroyed healthy NTFS partitions using various free tools in the past: its rather hit-and-miss.

Instead I ALWAYS use PartitionMagic for Windows, which has NEVER failed for me.

a) Buy PartitionMagic: yes its commercial, but its not that expensive, esp. if you value your sanity & data ;), and install it under Windows.

b) Shrink the NTFS partition(s), leave the remaining space "empty/unallocated", and reboot Windows to make sure nothing has gone wrong.

c) Boot using your linux cd, and follow the install process till it comes to partitioning. Create your linux partitions and swap space on the "free" space, and format them (my personal preference is ext3).

d) When you reboot, both Windows and linux should be available from the Grub (or Lilo) boot menu.

e) If you want to access the Grub configuration (on most distros), open the file /boot/grub/menu.lst.
If you wish to edit the file, the changes made will be automatically applied upon next boot.

Incidentally, it seems to me that the Vista boot process isnt vastly different to XP’s, so Grub can detect and boot it just fine (this was a huge relief when i installed it recently & then had to re-install Grub;)

by tombowie on Saturday 14th of October 2006 at 20:02

Because of work-related issues (my jobs have always required the use of some software that was relentlessly Windows-only) I’ve always dual booted some form of Linux (Mandrake/Mandriva and now openSUSE) and Windows (98 SE, 2000, XP) since 2001 and never had any problems. The worst issue would be inadvertently overwriting a partition, but all the partitioning tools I’ve used have made that fairly unlikely--you can do it, but you’ve almost got to work at it.

Overwriting the MBR on a Windows reinstall is a pain, but never been a real problem the couple times I had to do it. Mandrake/Mandriva provided a good MBR restore/repair utility on their bootable instal CDs that made it painless. Haven’t had to do it on openSUSE yet (knock on wood...).

by Len Cleavelin on Saturday 14th of October 2006 at 19:41

I side-stepped the problem of re-partitioning when first
trying dual-booting by adding another hard drive to put
linux on. Ideal for first experiments, then as you gain experience you can go for re-partitioning.

by BrianS on Saturday 14th of October 2006 at 01:35

p.s. i feel so much cleaner with my linux computers.

by wing ding on Friday 13th of October 2006 at 22:21

why should linux even be considerate of that stinkin’ windows operating? why does linux play second fiddle and compare itself to garbage microsoft. it seems everytime i read about linux there’s always a reference to god almighty microsoft. linux should come right out and say remove windows from your computer then you can install a fine linux distro. there’s too much emphasis on making linux friendly to windows computers. screw the kool-aid drinkers. i just wiped microsoft off of 2 machines and i didn’t create a backup before i did it. i don’t have restore disks either.

by wing ding on Friday 13th of October 2006 at 22:17

I’ve been configuring multi-boot windows and *nix on ix86 since 1996 in commercial consulting and training environments. It seems new computer users (and many old) jump in and try before researching ALL the issues. I’ve been caught jumping in head first; it’s a great way to learn something inside and out. Sometimes it’s also nice to get the low down before you start and there are many excellent tutorials on multi-boot installations. Know how to use Google?

Here’s a brief run down of multi-boot components a person should know about imho. It’s not a necesarily complete list or in any particular order, just off the top of my head:
Master Boot Record (MBR)
hard drive primary and extended partitions
tools for partition management
formatting & file systems (fat16, fat32, ntfs, ext3, ext2, reiserfs, nfs, smbfs, etc)
boot loaders

Some things to look at before starting an install:
available drivers for ALL hardware
primary install type (desktop, server, both)
install medium (internet, CD, DVD)
shell commands
available login methods

If you have ANY critical information that could be destroyed BACK IT UP. If you don’t know what it means to back up your data, RESEARCH IT! Basically it’s creating a copy of your data. If you’re trying to dual-boot and you want to save data and you ignore this warning or have never abided by it, start. It will save you countless hours of time and frustration.

The OS community is pushing to get linux variants on the desktop in a "reliable" way. I run XUbuntu/WinXP. I’m still testing but after successfully installing then fighting with FC5 on my laptop, I’m back to XUbuntu; by far the simplest and easiest variant I’ve ever installed.

by Scott Lane on Friday 13th of October 2006 at 14:09

I am not afraid of dual booting, as I know not to click "Install" and then "YES I WANT TO ERASE MY WHOLE DRIVE" and I know that I will be asked this before a install. But I also know how exactly computers work, how a boot process works, like booting a rescue system (or DBAN with the autonuke option) over the network (PXE) and similar stuff. People having no clue about computers will be afraid of even putting a linux CD into the drive.
Additionally I want to note that you can forget the survey. You will attract many computer literate people and very few clueless ones, especially now it is on digg, and most computer literate people wont be scared by loading an app into ram keeping their harddrive untouched until mounted.

by Jan on Friday 13th of October 2006 at 13:23

I dual-booted when I first tried Linux (and it was Ubuntu), because I didn’t know anything about Linux at the time and needed a fallback. Honestly, that was probably one of the more complicated things about starting out in Linux as far as installation and whatnot go, but not because it was particularly difficult so much as the rest was easier than I anticipated. Basically, you DO need to know what a "partition" is. Beyond that, I figure you’re all set. I know the live installer had issues pre-release for Dapper, but thought those were fixed, so am guessing your friend either had it before official release or did something odd in the process. (Either way, his machine is FAR from a paperweight, since even wiping all data and reinstalling from scratch fixes that, while being far from ideal.) After moving the partitions around a bit, everything was a breeze, and the Windows installation was automatically detected and added to the boot menu (which I figured I’d have to figure out manually). That was with Hoary, so the text mode install, but I have done the live CD installation on a friend’s computer with no problems (although I still prefer the alternate CD personally). Also, in talking to people about Linux I get a chance to gather data on their conceptions, and in short it seems dual-booting is intimidating not because it’s actually an intimidating process, but more so because a lot of people don’t actually understand the things they work with. Many don’t know the difference between a program, and operating system, and their computer itself, so when you talking about having two OSs, they get confused, and when confused the gut reaction is to also be scared. This is silly, as the only thing to be scared of is losing an afternoon. Data loss shouldn’t be an issue, since you should be regularly making backups of the important things anyway, even on a single-boot system that will stay that way. So in my book, don’t use a computer at all if you don’t know anything about what you’re working with. If you have enough basic knowledge to qualify you to use it with one OS, you’ll be fine trying two.

by Tony on Friday 13th of October 2006 at 13:07

Ok, I thought I would inject some reality here. Like most of the others, I have had no problems. Why? Because I am a highly skilled user. I know that I should image a hard drive before I start in case something goes horribly wrong. I do, and most who have posted here do also. We understand how to follow the instructions, where to find the information, and we probably all have a linux expert in our contact list to call for those .001% of problems we cant fix. But most people arent like us, they don’t clearly see a path to fix any problem that pops up. They see a winding maze of disappointment and frustration and they choose the ’easy’ route. While we might want to show our distain and profess our superior intellect, it is counter productive. Not being one to point out problems without solutions, I have a suggestion. The community needs to build a bulletproof, one button, "go back" installer option that will physically image the entire hard disk, verify it, and save it off to an external device before install. We shouldn’t even give them the option to skip it. Now I know, this is an act of charity for the ’novice’ user since WE don’t need it. But lets form a consensus here my friends, the n00bs need it. And for the rest of us, it might actually save us from our own arrogance during our next laptop install...:)
I don’t assume this is a new idea, so if someone knows where it is being done, please post. Perhaps we can get the Ubuntu developes to make it standard in a future release. -BrianHoliday - Digg user.

by BrianHoliday on Friday 13th of October 2006 at 10:58

No, I am not frightened of doing multi-OS boots. The only difficulty I encounter is the "recovery partitions" included these days by the OEMs (many thanks, Microsoft). Moving those around, or deleting them entirely can completely disable recovery in the event Windows goes South. My previous Compaq had a "recovery CD" that consisted solely of a 20K batch file that pulled the images from a hidden partition immediately after the Windows partition (hda2 in Linux parlance). Resizing the Windows partition for dual boot caused hda2 to become hda3 and the recovery batch file died with an error to contact Technical Support. So, no problem massaging drive partitions and multi-OS installs (Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, Freespire currently reside on my drive) but the "recovery" options of OEMs are a right pain in the posterior.

by Egon Spengler on Friday 13th of October 2006 at 08:54

I gave up on dual booting. I had Windows and Mandrake installed for about six months before I realised that I rarely booted one of the two. Since then every box that has come through my hands has been Linux only. Life has been less stressful since then.

by Toby on Friday 13th of October 2006 at 06:53

I had absolutely no problem with dual booting on most machines- use the boot loader on MBR, but the last time i tried this, I had a lot of constraints- " A USB DVD drive" installation DVD only,(no CD) , no internal DVD . motherboard doesnt support USB booting and so on.. a headache I somehow got through, but after all this I tried installing bootloader on first sector of root partition and then copying it, some problem with the lilo format and this didnt work out.
I got tired of things and simply installed bootloader on hte MBR and left

by shrek on Friday 13th of October 2006 at 06:15

I’ve been re-partitioning drives since about 2000 with many differenece hard drives on many different computers and never had a problem on any of them. When I was first ’playing’ with linux I had at least 4 different distros and windows all on the same computer with space for other ones that I wanted to try out. I think the many problem is that people don’t always read what they’re being told and when they do they don’t fully understand it and so they just accept the defaults, which can’t always (ever?) be right.

by EspadaV8 on Friday 13th of October 2006 at 04:14

Reading the instructions help. Most users that I have seen tend to skip instructions as well which are often well documented.

by Techflock.com on Friday 13th of October 2006 at 03:33

HOWTO "Dual Booting, ie, installing windows XP/2000 on a spare partition with Linux." at

http://linux.coconia.net/
http://m.domaindlx.com/LinuxHelp/ (mirror)

There are also HOWTOs on:

1) Cloning your windows XP/2000 installations using Linux.
2) 3D acceleration for ATI cards (simple procedure, works for SuSE, Mandriva and Debian).
3) accessing and writing to Windows XP (formatted with the NTFS) from Linux.
4) some discussion on the GPL and non-free third party kernel modules.
5) remix those 14 Debian installation CDs as 2 DVDs.
6) compile the worlds best DVD/Movie/Video/MP3 Player and Encoder (MPlayer and MEncoder).
7) the entire book "Linux Device Drivers 3" in HTML format.

by Jade on Friday 13th of October 2006 at 03:08

Sorry guys, the page is only displaying the most recent comments (around 20 or so). This isn’t ideal and I will be fixing it sometime soon, so if you’ve posted a comment on here and it has disappeared, fear not, it will return.

by Seopher on Friday 13th of October 2006 at 02:54

Another vote for VMWare here. I got sick of having to give Windows large amounts of space on my main drive and not being able to easily resize the amount allocated. By using VMWare I have the option of moving it onto my portable drive at any time (I’ve done this for Vista already). When I told somebody recently that I was running VMWare server on a lowish-end laptop they laughed but it works well enough :)

by Timothy Goddard on Friday 13th of October 2006 at 01:54

I have dual boot on 2 boxes right now (Fedora Core 5 and WinXP). I had a lot more, but switched mostly to linux alone. Problems I encountered while migrating Windows to Dualboot were: Destroying partitions of the Windows installation, unbootable Windows, Windows getting kicked out of the domain.
Here at the University of Salzburg we have a whole Department (Microbilogy) who use Dualboot WinXP and RedHat EL on all boxes. They seem to have no problem (save loss of domain connectivity on first boot)

by widhalmt on Friday 13th of October 2006 at 01:30

I dualboot slackware and windows XP. Probably the biggest fear is repartitioning an existing partition, which actually, is typically pretty non-volatile.

From there, getting the OS running and lilo or grub set up is cake, but it can be a living hell when you have to reinstall windows and your MBR where lilo/grub was configured gets overwritten...

by Jared on Friday 13th of October 2006 at 00:20

Oh Steve, here are a few of the steps involved: 1. Use a partitioning tool to make a partition to put Linux on.
2. Download an iso (CD image) from a linux distribution site.
3. Burn that iso to CD (it must be a live CD iso - some linux distribution that has a live CD, like Knoppix or some others).
4. Reboot your computer with the iso in the CDROM drive, it’ll start up and you’ll be in Linux.
5. Run the install script and choose to install Linux on the newly created partition.
In the end, you’ll have an option at your computer’s startup to start in Windows or Linux.

by Diginess on Thursday 12th of October 2006 at 22:53

I’ve been dual booting with Knoppix. It works great. Recently, I’ve figured out how to get wireless working reliably with a set of steps (for my card, it involved recompiling the kernel). I’ve been pushing it out to my whole family - includes four computers now, and a few more computers upcoming. Hopefully by the time Vista comes out, everybody will be happily on Linux.

by diginess on Thursday 12th of October 2006 at 22:47

i have dual boot before with both fedora core, xandros, freebsd etc... i would say that dual booting is not as hard as one would think..

by jellyfish on Thursday 12th of October 2006 at 22:02

My problem dual booting was resizing my NTFS partition which completed to 99.9% then corrupted the file allocation table at the last minute. While most of the data was recoverable, I’m no longer able to boot the partition.

by Callum on Thursday 12th of October 2006 at 20:01

dual booting is a bit old these days ..if your computer is a bit modern( > 1.0 Ghz processor and >=512 MB ram) ..the better alternative is to install the other os in a virtual machine, vmware player is free and is available for both windows and linux( i believe it will available soon on a mac or they could use parallel) ..vmware website have a list of prebuiled virtual machines is you like ..

i just loaded solaris 10 the other day on my virtual machine and used it for a while, just to check it out

by mtz on Thursday 12th of October 2006 at 19:59

As a Linux newbie, I set up my laptop to dual-boot XP and Mepis. I liked a lot about it, but I couldn’t get all of the hardware to work, and I travel too much to not have a reliable hibernate function.

When I tried to remove Mepis, everything went straight to poop. I had to repartition, reformat, and reinstall XP. It was a mess.

I have a CD of Ubuntu 6.06 sitting on the top of my dresser, daring me to try it out. Not until I have three free days, little guy!

by LaVaca on Thursday 12th of October 2006 at 18:55

never have serious problems to dual boot my boxes with Linux and Windows. But Windows is terrible in some cases to handle the boot sectors. The sequence to install OSes is important. Do not install Windows as the last OS. It may change the boot sector unexpectedly.

by Henry Zhu on Thursday 12th of October 2006 at 18:31

i have run dual boot using just about every suse distro,red hat,mandrake,ubuntu,and xandros, which is the easiest, to install as it does all the configuration and partitioning for you. Have run 4 distros at once including xp. i can say it doesn’t get any easier then xandros to dual boot.

by xchangerus on Thursday 12th of October 2006 at 17:53

I am a newbie at this. Every one talks geek. Is there anyone who would take the time to explain how to install linux?

by Steve on Thursday 12th of October 2006 at 17:41

I screwed up my system, had to do a complete re-install three separate times (and had to buy the discs from HP because they didn’t include them with the system).
Afterwards I realized I’d done some really stupid things to cause the problems, but it would have been nice to have known they were stupid things before I did them.
1. Think carefully ahead of time about how big you want the separate partitions. If you realize afterwards you might have chosen better, LEAVE IT ALONE. Knowing what you want is NOT the same as knowing how to do it.
2. Think carefully about what distribution you want to use. If you realize afterwards you might have chosen better, LEAVE IT ALONE. Knowing what you want is NOT the same as knowing how to do it. (I went through six different ones, ’almost nuked the hard drive.)
3. If your setup is working (both windows and linux come up more or less when you tell them to) and you want to make a major modification, first place a raw egg on your head and smash the egg with a hammer. If afterwards you still feel like making the changes, keep grabbing another egg until the cravings go away. If you realize afterwards you might have chosen better, LEAVE IT ALONE. Knowing what you want is NOT the same as knowing how to do it.

Oh, wait, I just discovered a repacement for the init., might cut a couple of seconds off of the boot-up.

’Gotta go.

by a_dreamer on Thursday 12th of October 2006 at 17:21

the only problems I’ve had with dula booting is trying to figure out some of the partitons that Dell, HP etc. use.

by rich on Thursday 12th of October 2006 at 17:10

Waiting for an OS to boot up, then waiting for it to shut down, then waiting for the other OS to boot up, repeat...who needs it? I guess I could hibernate Windows to shorten the wait, but this tends to put my LAN card in a state that makes it unavailable in Linux. And getting software suspend to work on Linux to shorten the boot up wait is not an activity for new or even many experienced users. No. Just pick an OS and run the other in one of the free VMWare products.

by nerdier-than-thou on Thursday 12th of October 2006 at 17:10

Never been an issue. I’ve dual booted dozens of machines and never had a problem. Sometimes I install a second drive for Linux but mostly I just partition the drive.

by jimgo on Thursday 12th of October 2006 at 16:52

I don’t think the dual boot is the issue, any one can do it, and anyone can install an OS. XP and Linux are pretty much the same when it comes to the install. The user just needs to understand what could happen, and make proper backups of any important data. Then again, why do you really need a dual boot? Just pick an OS and stick with it. They are all pretty much the same when you come down to it.

by Alice on Thursday 12th of October 2006 at 16:37

I’ve never had a problem multibooting. But I always do my partitioning first using the GParted LiveCD. Make sure to turn off the virtual memory and hibernate function in XP, then defrag the drive. Then do the XP resize from GParted Live, reboot into XP and turn back on the virtual memory (and hibernate if you want that function). Then reboot with your distro of choice install CD. Works every time!

by DebianRocks on Thursday 12th of October 2006 at 16:00

I once tried to dual boot XP and Red Hat. Something was really funky, though. I installed Red Hat to a seperate hard drive and *unplugged* the XP drive during the process. After I was done, I unplugged the Red Hat drive and tried to reboot to XP, but Windows had a problem. The two drives were never even plugged in a the same time, and it still messed the XP drive up. (I had some time, so I repeated this several times to ensure that was what was happening.) Must’ve been something in the BIOS. It was a while ago, and I knew far less about computers than I do know..

That experience definitely made we wary of trying to dual-boot, and it wasn’t until I got rid of that motherboard that I dared try to dual-boot again.

Today, though, I’m happily dual-booting Kubuntu and XP on my laptop, and I’m dual booting XP and Vista on my desktop with a partition set aside to install som Linux distro to soon.

by B-Con on Thursday 12th of October 2006 at 15:55

I have dual booted since SuSe 6, including several other distros and have been with Mandrake-driva since 7.0 mostly to ’standardize’ my own systems - and have never experienced a problem in many installs on many desktops and laptops.
I will admit to having been confused by the choices a few times, but a little thought always prevails successfully.
As far as the ’new’ Live CDs go - just haven’t tried them (not to be sarcastic, but I USE my Linux and have little inclination to always try the latest thing).
One more note - my last couple of systems (HP desk/Toshiba lap) came with XP - obviously - and I set them both dual boot with small M$ partitions and Mdk10 on the desk - Mandriva2006 on the lap - But I have not booted into XP on either since the install in January! I had not really thought about it until now, but I guess I have reached the point that M$ really is useless to me!
Maybe my next install will NOT be dual boot, come to think of it!

by Robert on Thursday 12th of October 2006 at 15:53

You need to prep your XP install by defraging and protect by backing up and you’ll never have to worry.
gparted is also a great way to go...
I dual booted for a while and then I just dropped XP. no need!!!

by Mike chicago on Thursday 12th of October 2006 at 15:47

About 6 mo ago I set up my laptop to dual-boot WinXPPro and Suse 10.1 AMD64. Suse install was very easy and flawless, including GRUB setup. Only problem these days is the wasted space I’ve got for my Win partition! *grin* Maybe boot Windows once every fortnight for games.

Only thing to worry about is if an install crashes; then you can screw up your HD partitions. Had it happen to me when trying to put Sabayon on my main desktop (also with XP-Pro). Ended up reinstalling both; couldn’t boot Win with a busted GRUB. *shrugs*

My advice is make sure to back up important data before installing ANYTHING that could mess up your system, Windows, Linux, or otherwise.

by LibraHorse on Thursday 12th of October 2006 at 15:46

Oh, come on, this is not even woth to be talking about guys. Dual booting is a pease of cake.

by Uriel on Thursday 12th of October 2006 at 15:43

Well, I have dual booted before. A few times I have run into trouble. My advice is that if risking loosing your OS is too great a risk for you, then don’t do it. There are other ways to experiment with other OS’s without risking your data.

If you are not afraid then I suggest you try dual booting. It is an interesting and sometimes frustrating experiment. There is nothing like trying to resurrect your Master Boot Record after accidentally deleting it while trying to configure a boot loader...

The point is that dual booting is or it isn’t, there is nothing there to fear. It is loosing data that scares people. A simple solution is make sure you have back ups BEFORE you go mucking around with your hard drive. If you don’t know how to make back ups, learn how to do that first.

Now that would be a novel addition to a Gnu/Linux distro, a backup system that will help you to produce cds of your data or shuffle your data to a protected area of the hard disk.

Imagine that on a live cd...

I have used a number of open and closed source apps to partition my HD, and I like booting up my knoppix live cd and using qtparted and playing frozen bubble until the operations are complete.

The recommendation I have to people who wish to experiment with an alternative OS and leave their current setup in tact is to do exactly that. Get a hand me down computer from someone and try experimenting with that. There is never any reason to risk getting into something you don’t understand while risking what you already have. Nothing is that good, not even Ubuntu (glances at the ubuntu hacks sitting on desk).

I use Ubuntu because I think it is neat and I want to support it. I also use windows because that is what came on my dell. My first computer (built from cast offs and cheap parts) went through many OS’s often many at once. I remember quad booting win 98, win 2000, red hat 6.5 and mandrake something or another. Now that was a pain to set up, I wouldn’t recommend doing it unless you just want to suffer.

So for those with acerbic comments about windows or Ubuntu or what ever, perhaps a better use of your time and energy is learning how to use the tools available or learning how to better the exisiting applications.

Who would you rather have operate on you, a monkey with a scalpal and forceps or a surgeon with a swiss army knife?

by Omnivorous on Thursday 12th of October 2006 at 15:31

Learning how to install multiple OSes on my desktop has been a great learning experience. You simply need to take the right precautions before jumping in: backup your data, test the backups, and make sure you have all your installation media. The trickiest part for me has been conflicting bootloaders (install Windows first!), but at the most I’ve been able to install 6 functional OSes on one machine (2 Windows, 2 BSDs, and 2 Linux flavors.) Tip for those who despise GRUB and LILO -- GAG is a _very_ easily configurable bootloader that can boot from master and slave drives. Planning ahead for a multiboot system --just leave some raw space for future partitions/slices-- will save the hassle of after-the-fact partition managing. Note to Xyphus -- I’ve been able to run XP off a slave drive’s 2nd partition using GAG.

by cheapskate on Thursday 12th of October 2006 at 15:21

Dual booting XP Pro and Ubuntu Dapper from the live cd was very easy though am dual booting both on separate partitions if you follow the instructions it is not as difficult as trying to install other distros of linux eg fedora, in FC4 you had to manually mount ntfs partitions but ubuntu recognises existing ntfs partitions and hardware which makes dual booting easy.

by Liquid Cactus on Thursday 12th of October 2006 at 14:59

to Garron did u even try to contact Microsoft regarding your Problem they have one of the biggest support departments in the world
and are happy to answer any of their customers questions it is quite obvious u have never tried to have any contact with microsoft support

by kledge on Thursday 12th of October 2006 at 14:43

Uhh...

I’ve been using Linux a few months and still consider myself a newbie. Amen rysiek, Have you actually partitioned a hard drive in the last few years? GPartEd, QTPartEd, they sure seem to work for me. Not to be rude, but I did it easily my first few times. If you find a good HowTo it’s easy. That said, seperate LiveCDs are always slightly safer.

by Benanto on Thursday 12th of October 2006 at 14:41

Oh yeah. Believe me or not, in the dual boot what should be scared is Windows, not Linux.

First, you try Linux on an other computer. But this requires of course some extra hardware, may be two keyboard, mouse, and screen.

Then, you try it on your computer, with some Dual Boot. And you are not sure if it will detect every piece of your ’new’ hardware.

Now it may vary depending on your habits, but you will probably want to delete one of the OS.

And in my opinion there are no user friendly tool delete one OS on your computer and leave the other. That is shocking at least.

In my experience, I was using Linux only, even if some partition was left with FAT32. which was loaded with data only.

And I tried to re-install Windows on it, for some reason. It was temporary. And guess what fucked up ? The Windows 2000 install crashed when I was trying to delete one partition. After a reboot, I ended with 100 paritions of 13 Go each, on a 13 Go hard drive.

That is the story that made me sick of Windows definitely.

But I keep trying it to remember me that it is so fucked up.

I tried Vista some times ago and I must say their Dual Boot is crazydumbest. You must boot Vista to edit the boot menu. Because the only tool to edit it is only available for Vista. So if you delete Vista, you can’t do a shit with their dual boot.

Anyway, Dual boot should be reapparing when everyone is gonna try that Vista on their computer, but it definitely not a long term solution in any case, Linux or not.

by Leibowitz on Thursday 12th of October 2006 at 14:27

...isn’t something that I’d recommend for the novice computer user. To sum it up, I think Ubuntu’s user-friendly install still has a way to go yet

by john on Thursday 12th of October 2006 at 14:20

I think that it’s just the dapper drake install that’s the scary part. I had some trouble dual booting dapper drake with Windows Vista RC1. Both would install fine, but dapper drake wouldn’t mount the windows partition and never gave me a reason why. I’m very new to Linux and had some assistance from some more knowledgable friends. I had to manually modify Grub’s menu.lst file in order to finally solve the problem. Granted, the file is well commented. However, this

by John on Thursday 12th of October 2006 at 14:18

It was a nightmare. A year ago a buddy of mine installed one of the linux distros on my machine and made it "dual boot" with XP. But I wanted to have XP be the default OS, and I couldn’t figure out how, because I was a newbie. I wound up blowing away the hard drive and reloading everything, which wasted at least three days.

Screwing around with grub and lilo is very frustrating, especially for new users, which is what linux is trying to attract, right?

by jimbo92107 on Thursday 12th of October 2006 at 14:17

I’m not scared to multi-boot.

I have just started into the realm of GNU/Linux in the last 6 months or so. I have created multi-boot before that using may combinations of 98 2000 NT and XP. I am currently running a triple-boot of Ubuntu/Dapper, XP Pro, and Vista RC1.

The first time I installed Ubuntu I had some networking issues, but after a little research everything works fine.

As far as partitioning software goes, I have never used a commercial app. such as Partition Magic. I have used the GParted Live CD a few times with fantastic results. Able to do everything that I wanted to do with no problems.

by eric on Thursday 12th of October 2006 at 14:17

Dual booting doesn’t scare me at all... I’ve actually been dual-booting (and sometimes tri-booting) since back in the days of DOS. I started to dabble with multi-boots back when I got my first copy of OS/2. My first go was a little shaky, but I followed the directions to the letter. Once you get over the initial trepidation, it actually becomes rather easy.

I do plan out my partitioning scheme before I even start up any partitioning tools... My prefered method is to use a separate drive for each OS. If this is not an option for some, just a little forethought on how you want to divide up your drive(s) makes a big difference. Just knowing that if you plan on using an OS like Windows98/SE/ME as a boot option, it MUST be the first OS on the drive. The other OSes (W2K/XP, Linux, BSD, etc.) really don’t care where you put them...

I’m currently running dual boots of WindowsXP and Windows XP64bit on one machine, and Windows 2000 and SuSE Linux on my second machine.

by Xyphus on Thursday 12th of October 2006 at 13:45

Was dual booting dapper and winxp

since then have reinstalled dapper and edgy between 10-20 times each and I forgot my xp cd when I came to college. I’m not afraid of dual booting, I just wish I knew why some things don’t work so I could fix it...

by quik77 on Thursday 12th of October 2006 at 13:45

I’ve done dual-boot systems many, many times and never had problems. That thing that I always do that makes me different from most users is that I always partition the disk beforehand, then do a fresh Windows install, then install Linux. If you’re afraid of resizing existing partitions, it may also be an option to install a new hard drive and do the Linux install there.

by sildan on Thursday 12th of October 2006 at 13:30

I’ve been trying to get Linux to work on my new system, but Ethernet is not working and yesterday I couldn’t get it to boot at all. So I’ve given up for now.

by Virtunate on Thursday 12th of October 2006 at 13:17

Well, Looking at the poll now, It seems like the ones who were afraid knew of the poll. It isnt’t that scarry. My Laptop is a Quad-Boot. Fedora Core 5, Windows XP, Windows 2003 Server, and MacOSX

by NeonTempest on Thursday 12th of October 2006 at 13:17

I think installing any OS is daunting to the large majority of users...even windows..

by frankp on Thursday 12th of October 2006 at 13:12

I was nervous the first time I installed Mandrake 9.0 alongside XP because I’d never done it before and things are rarely as simple as they sound, but I had backups, and it worked just fine. I used Partition Magic the first couple of times, but QTParted ever since. I’ve got XP/Dapper right now, but I’ve dual or even triple booted XP with Mandrake/Mandriva, SUSE, Simply Mepis, Ubuntus Warty and Breezy and even Debian (network install of Sarge was so geeky--heh). Messing with partitions doesn’t make me at all nervous anymore, but I still make good backups, just in case. The one time you don’t make backups is the one time you’ll need them. ;)

by Lisa on Thursday 12th of October 2006 at 13:08

With a decent partition manager it’s not scary at all. To make it less scary a little pre-emptive work makes it almost silly to be afraid; research the process, clean up your system (ie scan for virus, remove useless files / data, defrag, backup or create a ghost image, etc...) and then have at it. Now, is it a pain to go through all those steps? Yep... it takes time and effort, but in the end you might find you’ve learned some pretty nifty stuff. Fedora core 5 was a painless install.

by Mike S. on Thursday 12th of October 2006 at 12:49

I’ve installed ubuntu/kubuntu several times as a dual boot and never had an issue. My secret is to use a different partitioner than the one included with ubuntu install. I use gParted live CD to resize my Windows partition then tell the ubuntu installer to use the largest block of free space and things run smooth from there.
http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livecd.php

by Dave on Thursday 12th of October 2006 at 12:41

I used partitionMagic to resize my harddisk and left it as raw format to install Linux. Works real well as dual boot with Windows XP and Ubuntu Linux on my laptop

by Shiva on Thursday 12th of October 2006 at 12:37

I have never had a problem dual booting Ubuntu and XP Pro and have done the installation a number of times.

by Ryan on Thursday 12th of October 2006 at 12:30

I had the same problem...
I tried installing ubuntu on my laptop on dual boot, and in crashed when I was at the partitionning stage...
SKINp

by SKINp on Thursday 12th of October 2006 at 12:26

Hi voted "Scared" its not really true in that I’m not scared of dual booting but I am of trying to install it on the HD in the first place.

The problem being I have a RAID 0 system. I already partionioned it with PM ready to receive Ubuntu ( with v3 of the file system -can’t remember its writing - ) But the Live CD installation does not recognise that partition.

I then downloaded Mandriva distro that one recognises it, but looking at its interface on the Live CD ( don’t understand Konkeror I guess) I am afraid to commit to its installation...Not knowing if doing so I will be able to change it for Ubuntu once done.

by eden7c on Thursday 12th of October 2006 at 11:51

Yes let me add in the notion that XP has gone sour on me a couple of times - so I’m not picking on Linux specifically and I appreciate the NTFS problems involved, it’s just a curiosity when those around me have also had problems.

So I’m investigating whether people are scared to try it or not.

by Seopher on Wednesday 11th of October 2006 at 23:55

I’m kind of fuzzy on this particular "good, bad" thing. Steven, you have experienced problems with both install (I think) and, running linux on your dual boot machine. It appears that your friend’s machine was munched in the install.

Well, hell Steven, any operating system will screw me royal given the right combination of BIOS, drivers, hardware, settings and so on and on. Recently, I installed XP on a box. Given Microsoft’s wonderful feedback (none), it took four tedious attempts to figure out the problem (on my own) and finally arrive at a stable installation.

If "x" linux distro claims that their install always works but, sometimes doesn’t -- they are no better or worst than Microsoft.

The last few days, there has been a plethora of articles reporting "fill-in-the-blank" is broken. Five or six wandering paragraphs later, we arrive at the conclusion -- it should not be broken.

This article is of that vane. Yes Steven, you are right but, I can not see the value of your article nor, your subjective poll.

On the other hand, the sage advice contained in the first two comments is empowering -- which, in my mind, is one of the most noble reasons for writing.

by --garron on Wednesday 11th of October 2006 at 16:42

You hit the nail on the head there, rysiek... The installers themselves are fine its the damned partitioning-from-hell procedure that you’re never sure you’re going to survive.

For anyone that hasn’t done one of these before: its like taking a hypodermic needle, finding a drug addict, sticking it in their arm and then sticking it in yours.

by Amen rysiek on Wednesday 11th of October 2006 at 14:23

not scared at all - although I get a sort of goosebumps when I’m doing the actual partitioning, if there’s a windoze system already on some partition on the disk.

in such cases I use PartitionMagic and I have never been dissappointed with the results (and I am currently taking care of 4 dual-booting boxen).

the thing is - M$ has never released a specification of the NTFS filesystem, so tools like parted (the back-end used by AFAIK all the partitioning GUI’s - and ncurses text-based gui *is* a GUI) were a wee bit like children in the fog by night when it comes to how to resize/move an NTFS partition.

this is changing (slowly) now, but it is changing for the better.

nevertheless, if you have to resize/move your windoze partition - use PartitionMagic or a similar commercial app for the time being.

and believe me, it’s not easy for me to recommend a closed-source app! ;)

p.s.
if it’s useful:
Kubuntu 6.06 Dapper Drake here, and setting Edgy on another box right now.

by rysiek on Wednesday 11th of October 2006 at 13:09

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