Dual Boot with NTFS

[Erik Hemdal]

> 
> ------------------------------
> 
> Message: 10
> Date: Tue, 9 Nov 2004 18:50:21 -0500
> From: "Lotsa Cabo" <lotsacabo at spamjammer.com>
> Subject: Dual Boot with NTFS
> To: "(Group) Fedora" <fedora-list at redhat.com>
> Message-ID: <20041109235027.52D2F403A6 at omta18.mta.everyone.net>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
> 
> I have a laptop with XP on an NTFS primary partition.  I would like to
> install FC3 in the unused second half of the drive.  I am assuming the boot
> loader would end up being written to the MBR and the first partition (again,
> the first partition is NTFS).  Is this possible?
>  
> Thanx,
> Ryan

Ryan:

Haven't tried this with FC3 yet, but dual-booting works well on prior
releases (RH6/7/8/9/FC1).  FC2 had an installation issue that was scary,
but work-aroundable; otherwise it works about as well as any distro I've
seen.  GRUB goes in the MBR, and the only difference you'll see is a
GRUB screen for a few seconds when you boot.

Some partitioning tools such as PartitionMagic provide the ability to
format empty space as a Linux partition (using ext3 or ext2).  But I've
always had good luck leaving empty space on disk and letting anaconda
(the Linux installer) take care of matters for me.  Anaconda will call
Disk Druid to prepare the disk.

If you repair Windows in the future, it will overwrite GRUB with the
Windows bootloader, but you can fix that with grub-install should it
become necessary.

Note that you can't mount an NTFS partition in write mode from Linux,
but other than that, Linux will be very happy rooming-in with Windows.

Enjoy!   Erik