dell windows 7/fedora dual boot?

[Matthew Saltzman]

On Thu, 2011-05-19 at 10:10 -0400, Tom Horsley wrote: 
> On Thu, 19 May 2011 08:53:40 -0500
> Richard Shaw wrote:
> 
> > Mine is still XP but assuming that it
> > still uses the NT style boot loader with boot.ini it should be pretty
> > easy.
> 
> Nah, boot.ini was too easy for people to find out about
> in google :-). In Vista/Windows 7 there is now a special
> boot manager and some binary format nonsense (hence
> the need for programs like EasyBCD).

I do the following:

     1. Create a primary /boot partition as part of the Fedora
        installation.  I actually re-used the partition for the
        lightweight mail reader system (whatever that's called), which
        was /dev/sda2.  If you didn't get that feature, there should be
        an available primary partition slot. 
     2. On the screen that allows you to select the location for GRUB,
        select your /boot partition. 
     3. After installing Fedora, boot with the rescue disk and use fdisk
        to make the /boot partition active. 
     4. Reboot.  GRUB will be your boot manager.  Boot Windows from
        there. 
     5. If you ever need to hide the Fedora installation (for Dell
        support, e.g.), just use fdisk to make the main Windows
        partition active. To switch back, follow Step 3.

-- 
                Matthew Saltzman

Clemson University Math Sciences
mjs AT clemson DOT edu
http://www.math.clemson.edu/~mjs