>"..Thirdly, I have a largish HDD, and rather than re-format the whole thing, if I could somehow 'create' a multiboot with Linux/Windoze over my existing system, it would be better. I've heard lots of different stuff, the upshot was that most say you can't, and one guy said you can, with Partition Magic. Any ideas?..."
>If its a FAT partition you can use FIPS (www.igd.fhg.de/~aschaefe/fips/) to resize it. Its free and worked for me without any dramas when I first installed linux ~6 months ago. It may already be on your distributions cd. I think there is a GNU tool called parted which does a similar thing but don't know much about it. *** I have used Partition Magic (www.powerquest.com) to resize partitions. How is your HDD partitioned at present. Is it just one whole chunk with windows ? What is your HDD size ? What you can do is shrink the first partition which I presume is Windows. You can install Linux right next to it. But beware you may not be able to install /swap though. It would not do it for me. As for booting between the two I used Boot Magic [BM](include with Partition magic). Install in Windows, and after Linux is installed, BM will see it. Just add it to your boot menu . Or better yet you can use VMWare for Windows or Linux. With VMware from within either Linux or Windows (depending on for which OS version you get) you can switch between them without having to reboot your PC to change OS. It creates a Virtual Machine for each OS you install. Just install VMWare for Windows, run it, create a Virtual machine for Linux, Power On, and load your Linux CD in. This will install Linux, and then you can boot to it from within Windows. Louis. -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
