On Saturday 17 October 2009 3:06:19 pm William Douglas wrote: > In order to properly install dual boot with XP and Ubuntu you need to > split the hard drive using a partition utility and then format the > empty partition as FAT32 to install ubuntu to it. Ubuntu cannot set up > on a NTFS drive which is XP's default file structure.
You really don't need to format the new second partition at all after shrinking the existing NTFS partition and creating the new one. Just leave it unformatted and let the Linux installer format it to whatever file system you decide to use. That would be ReiserFS for me here. It will create the partition structure for you. FAT32 is not a journaling file system, so you would not want to use that for Linux anyway and I suspect the Linux installer will just reformat that to something appropriate anyway. As to partitioning utilities, Mandriva's installer does a fine job at repartitioning existing NTFS drives. I don't know about the Ubuntu installer, I've never tried it. As for pay partitioning utilities, for mixed Windows and Linux stay (make that run away fast) from Partition Magic. It's a solid program, but makes the false assumption that *nix partitions must start on a hard drive cylinder boundary, which is not a requirement and many don't. If you ever use anything else to work with partitions, or use PM on an already partitioned partition set up with a *nix partitioning utility or one that is properly aware, you'll have a blown hard drive. Paragon's Hard drive Manager is aware of properly handling *nix and other partitions and does not have the problem of cylinder boundaries that PM does. I own that one, but mostly just use the Mandriva utility to do the partitioning these days. If you just use the utility to shrink the existing Windows NTFS partition, leaving the amount of hard drive space that you want free and unpartitioned, let the Linux installer decide the rest, and then install GRUB automatically into the MBR, and you will have a dual boot working setup. I do things more complex here because I have many Linux and Microsoft versions on the same machine. I won't go into that now. It's not hard but takes just a little more planning and a different bootloader in the MBR chaining to the individual bootloaders in the various partition's boot partition root sector. I've had W98, 2K, XP, W7, Solaris 8 and 9, and quite a few Linux distros all installed and multi-booting on the same machine. I never share home or other directories across the various Linux distros because the configuration differences are just not worth the needless grief across various versions of the applications. Hard drives are cheap enough now not trying to get multiple revisions of apps that have changing configs working is just not worth the grief. I keep them separate and never have an issue. I do share the swap partition under Linux. Rick Kunath, k9ao
