Ease of installation?

[SRB]

> The historic requirement has been to to defrag and then manually
repartition
> a hard drive in order to set up a dual-boot windows-linux system. I hear
> rumours that some of the latest distros may be able to do this
> semi-automatically. Could someone aware of the state of the art in this
give
> a summary of the current situation?

Depending on your situation, you can do the following (just recently did
this myself):

1. If your existing Windows system is on a SEPARATE partition (ie. you have
more than one partition on your drive and Windows only occupies one of those
partitions), you can easily use the Disk Management utility in XP/2000/NT to
create an empty partition of the size you want for your new Linux
installation (I picked 10GB for mine). Then I know from experience that if
you install either Red Hat 9 or Fedora Core 1, it will detect that unused
partition and allow you to select it for the install, in which case it will
automatically sub-partition it to create a boot, root and swap partitions
(still leaving around 9GB for your root files).

2. If you need to modify the partition that contains your Windows system,
you might need something like Partition Magic (commercial Windows software),
but I'm not sure how reliable it is for modifying the main system partition.
I'd suggest to patiently backup everything you need (take your time not to
miss anything you may require later) and reinstall windows, then install
linux. Important note, is that during windows install (XP/2000/NT), you'll
want to delete your existing drive partitions and create a new partition
that is NOT 100% size of the disk (again something like 10GB). Then install
Windows here, and the extra unpartitioned space you can set up for Linux
like in point #1.

I hope that helps a bit.

Just an FYI, the current setup I have on my drive is 10GB partition for
Windows, 10GB partition for Linux (which was subdivided by Fedora into 3
partitions: boot, root, and swap) and the remainder of my drive is set up as
a FAT32 partition so that I can access files there from either OS.

-Steve.

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