Fedora dual boot

[Anton Markov]

Simon Tonekham wrote:
> Hmmmm......after all these suggests you gave to me, I'm still trying to find a 
> way on how to Install Fedora safely. But thanks for giving me all those 
> suggestions. As for the Extended partition of my master hard drive, I believe 
> it's a very big and tedious process which involves backing up my data from my 
> master hard drive and formatting it as a extended partition. What is the 
> difference between Primary and Extended?
John McGregor's statement about the exteded partition made no sense to 
me either. Generally, each hard drive can have four primary partitions, 
but one of them can be "extended" into any number of extended 
partitions. That way you can have 3 primary and an infinite number of 
extended partions. However, I see no way how they can span multiple drives.

I think what John was trying to say, was that if you create the FAT32 
partition on your Linux drive,
a) You _won't_ have to reformat your primary drive.
b) When you remove Linux, you can still access that drive from Windows.

As long as you tell Fedora/Linux not to touch your primary drive (except 
to put the master boot record there), you can do anything you want to 
your secondary drive. In the worst case you can reformat the second 
drive from the Windows boot disk, recover your MBR on the first drive, 
and forget about everything. So DON'T WORRY.


> How do I create a FAT32 partition on my 
> second hard drive during the Linux installation process? is it necessary?

The FAT32 partition is not necessairy, but it will allow you to work on 
the same files from both Windows and Linux. That way if, for example, 
you started typing a letter on Windows, you could save it to the FAT32 
partition, and then open it from Linux, edit it, save it, and then open 
again in Windows. The point is it gives you freedom to work from both 
operating systems.

As John McGregor suggested, you can click "Custom" in the Fedora 
installer when it asks you about partitioning your hard drive. I've 
never installed Fedora, but I imagine the process is fairely simple. 
Just tell it to create a 15GB drive of type FAT32 at the end of your 2nd 
hard drive (Linux will likely call it 'hdb', but check the size to be 
sure).

> 
> Simon
> 
>  >From: John McGregor <mr.mcgregor-rieW9WUcm8FFJ04o6PK0Fg at public.gmane.org>
>  >Reply-To: tlug-lxSQFCZeNF4 at public.gmane.org
>  >To: tlug-lxSQFCZeNF4 at public.gmane.org
>  >Subject: [TLUG]: Re: Fedora dual boot
>  >Date: Sat, 29 Jan 2005 21:37:01 -0500
>  >
>  >>
>  >>One more question that i'm concerned of, The problem is, if I'm not
>  >>comfortable on having Linux on my system, how do I remove the
>  >>shared partition (the FAT32 partition) and the GRUB boot loader
>  >>that goes with it? How do I restore my system back to it's original
>  >>state after removing Linux off my system?
>  >>
>  >
>  >
>  >The easiest way is to boot from your Win XP CD, follow the
>  >directions to get into Repair and at the prompt type FIXMBR and then
>  >type yes when asked if you want to continue. You seem to be really
>  >concerned with the FAT 32 partition, so in your case I would pit it
>  >in the Linux drive. That way you would have the option of leaving
>  >the slave in the machine and reformatting it as an extended
>  >partition of the master drive.


-- 
Anton Markov <("anton" + "@" + "truxtar" + "." + "com")>

GnuPG Key fingerprint =
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*** LINUX - MAY THE SOURCE BE WITH YOU! ***
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