Re: FC6 dual boot with Win XP Home on Compaq Presario 2500 Series notebook

Thanks a lot for the input, Nil. I will try out the dual boot exercise after partitioning using GParted Live CD.
  In Windows XP, if you connect a new (external) hard drive thru a USB port, you can "initialize" the drive and create partitions using: "Start" -> "My Computer" -(right click)--> "Manage" -> "Computer Management" -> "Disk Management". If you don't format the partitions, the filesystem of the partition is seen as "RAW". But I guess it is one of those Microsoft quirks.

The good thing, from what I understand, is that the "1024 cylinder limit" is unlikely in my notebook's BIOS.

Thanks once again.

Cheers...

Nil Gradisnik  wrote:
  I don't quite understand how did you create 4 partitions without
formating/creating them? I think that's not possible.
> From what I read is that windows installation created one big NTFS

partition out of your entire disk space.

My advice is to format your drive clean.
First, create a partition for windows, you can create a 15Gb or
whatever NTFS of FAT32 partition(fat32 would be a better choice if you
want to read/write your windows files from linux and if you'll mostly
use linux). Leave the rest of the drive space unpartitioned.
Install windows on this partition.

Then boot your Fedora installation disc and the installer will
properly use the unpartitioned space. You can manually create
partitions from fedora installer, but I think the default layout will
be good.

For disk partitioning you can use GParted live cd:
http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livecd.php

Hope this helps.

On 12/27/06, [e-mail] 
wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I bought a new 60 GB Seagate internal hard drive for my Compaq Presario 2500
> Series notebook with the hopes of creating a dual boot system.
> I initialized the hard drive and created 4 partitions of 15 GB each on it. I
> did not format any partition. Then I plugged the hard drive in my notebook
> and installed Windows XP Home on the first 15 GB partition, after which I
> restarted the notebook and booted from the Fedora Core 6 Disk 1.
> Unfortunately, FC6 shows only one partition of 60 GB formatted as NTFS.
> My questions are:
> Do I have to format the next 15 GB partition as ext3 for FC6 to read it
>
> properly ?
> 2. I read about the "1024 cylinder limit" problem. Do I have to create the
> first (Windows) partition less than 2 GB or 8.4 GB so as to allow FC6 to
> determine the partitions correctly ? I had bought my laptop in Nov. 2003 so
> I am not sure if this "1024 cylinder limit" is an issue at all with it. Is
> there any way to find it out by looking at the Setup information during
> Windows boot ?
>
> Any help or insight would be highly appreciated.
>
> Thanks in advance...
>
> Cheers,
> TechieGuy
>
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