dumb newbie question...

[Jonathan Berry]

On Thu, 27 Jan 2005 18:30:04 -0800 (PST), Charles Malespin
<cmalespin at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Hi, 
>   I have been trying to run a dual boot with XP and FC2.  I think I finally
> know what I need to do to get around the boot problems with XP.  I am making
> a CD of Knoppix to boot from.  How do I know if I need to shrink my windows
> partition, and how small do I make it?  I have a 160Gb hard drive and I want
> 60 windows, 100 FC2.   After this I can just find out what my cyl. heads,
> etc are from knoppix and run the install normally.  Then enter those numbers
> at a command line right?  I just want to make sure that I am not missing any
> steps cause I have been reading 100 differnt ways to do it and I am getting
> confused.  Is this method going to work?  Thanks to all for the help today,
> sorry for the dumb newbie questions I just really wanna get started with
> linux! 
> Charles

Hi Charles,
I highly recommend that you install FC3 instead of 2.  One reason is
that FC2 install has been known to mess up some things with dual-boot
machines.  This is well documented and can be recovered from, but I'm
sure you don't want to mess with an inoperable system.  That said, I
have not seen this bug personnaly.  FC3 does not appear to have the
same problem.
I don't understand your questions about finding out about cylinders
and heads and things for the HD.  You don't need to know about that to
install Linux.  Perhaps you have read about the above mentioned bug
and that is why you are asking.
Antonio has some good tips for the prep stage (0.-3.).  I'd add in
there, turn off the swap file and reboot before doing the Defrag. 
This should remove a huge band of unmovable space (shown in green) on
your drive.  Make sure that all the data appears to be close to the
front of the drive before resizing.  You need to resize if your
Windows install uses the entire drive, which is probably the case.  It
only would not be if you installed Windows and setup the disk to have
multiple partitions, and since you are asking, you probably didn't do
that : ).  I recommend SystemRescueCD http://www.sysresccd.org/ and
QTparted to resize the NTFS drive.  I have used it twice and it worked
great (though it's still use at your own risk : )).
I'll second Michael's suggestion about the vfat partition.  Since you
have 160 GB, you have plenty of space.  Your 60 GB Windows and 100 GB
Linux should be very roomy.  You can install about 7-10 GB of Linux
stuff from the CD, so you probably don't need that much (the 100 GB)
for Linux, but it won't hurt anything.  It's up to you.
By the way, these are not dumb questions; I've seen much worse on this
list : ).  Welcome to Linux, I think you'll find things are much
easier than you maybe expect.

Jonathan