[lug] dual boot

[Ed Hill]

On Fri, 2002-03-29 at 08:31, Hugh Brown wrote:
> I have a user that wants to dual boot his thinkpad.  Right now it has
> winxp on it.  Since it is a thinkpad, it didn't come with a floppy drive
> (and I have no usb external drive).  The user claims that it won't boot
> off the cdrom (he couldn't find anything in the bios to set boot order).

For help with specifics, find your laptop model at: 

  http://www.linux-laptop.net/
  http://www.linux-on-laptops.com/ibm.html

and you'll likely get plenty of helpful info.


> What options do I have for partitioning programs that won't mess up xp
> and how can I get this thing to boot to load linux?

We're dual-booting WinXP and Linux (RH 7.2) on two systems here in our
lab.  The default boot-loader (GRUB) in RH 7.2 auto-detects and works
just fine with WinXP.


> What options do I have for partitioning programs that won't mess up xp
> and how can I get this thing to boot to load linux?
 
Partition Magic has worked well for me (and PowerQuest gave my former
LUG--TriLUG--a copy to be used at Installfests which was cool of them).


> Also, does anyone know if it is possible to boot recent thinkpads from
> their cd drive?

Yes.  I've done exactly that on the following ThinkPads:

  A22p, i1560, 600, 600X, T20

and I'm sure that you can get the CD to boot on your model.  You may
want to get a more recent Linux distro as I've seen some flakiness when
using "older" kernels (early 2.4 series) on very new IDE chipsets.

hth,
Ed


-- 
Edward H. Hill III, PhD
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