[lug] Hand Holding Needed

[Nate Duehr]

Charlie Rose wrote:

> Troops!
>
> I have a new laptop (Compaq Presario R3000, 1.6 MHz, 60 GB HD, 256 MB 
> RAM). It's running WinXP Professional SP2, now, but I'd like to make 
> it a dual-boot machine so it will also run my Mandrake 9.0 Linux. I 
> used PartitionMagic 8.0 to set up a 5 GB Linux Ext2 partition, and a 
> 512 MB Linux Swap partition. (I did this because the PartitionMagic 
> writeup told me to.) But now, I'm stalled. I worry mightily about 
> charging ahead with the PartitionMagic instructions because I'm 
> unfamiliar with some of the terminology, doing something dumb, and 
> crashing the whole shebang. This, despite my having formed disk images 
> of all my Windows partitions. Oh yes ... I've already installed 
> BootMagic 8.0. Also, there's a Win-modem built-in, and I'd like Linux 
> to be able to use it if possible.
>
> I'd really appreciate it if someone knowledgeable about such things 
> would be willing to give me some guidance, and answer some really 
> newbie questions. Any takers?
>
> With /many/ thanks ....
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Charlie Rose               FAX: 303-545-6674
> Innovative Scientific Analysis and Computing
> 6168 Flagstaff Road, Boulder, Colorado, 80302, USA

CLUE-North has an InstallFest on Saturday I believe -- that might be an 
excellent place to get direct assistance, especially since it's a laptop 
and portable!  ;-)

You're on the right track, athough you don't really need to have already 
created the filesystems with PartitionMagic.  You just need PM to make 
enough blank room for you to play with while leaving your XP intact.  
Also most distros are using either ext3 or ReiserFS these days, and 
they're both highly recommended for a laptop where you might lose power 
suddenly... long fsck's on a laptop are annoying.

You probably won't need Boot Magic unless you like it -- the free GRUB 
bootloader can boot both OS's, just fine.  (Depending on your disk size 
and geometry, LILO probably can too.)

I think if you go up to Mandrake 10, it would have done all of this for 
you... you can look at the installation documentation, but I think they 
have built in partition resizing and it will create the necessary 
partitions and squish Windows down to make room.  It's been a while 
since I played with Mandrake, and I have SuSE 9.1 on my laptop right now.

Anyway, for where you're at now... you could literally boot any bootable 
Linux distro's CD and do an installation -- just being careful to avoid 
overwriting your Windows partition(s).  At the end, depending on your 
distro, it'll install GRUB or LILO as your bootloader into the Master 
Boot Record of the disk -- this would be the only destructive part of 
the install -- you'd overwrite Windows bootloader. 

As a side-note here, you can boot from a WinXP CD somday in the future 
if you need to, and restore the Windows MBR if you end up not leaving 
Linux on the machine, and everything would be "normal" after that.

Having backups (your "images") is a great idea... at least you know for 
sure you can get back where you started from.

Okay, continuing on... if you install Linux to the new partitions you 
can either format them again or go with the formatting that PM did... 
your choice.  Just leave the Windows partition(s) alone.  But again, 
you'll probably want to reformat them ext3 or ReiserFS or whatever 
default your distro likes.  I think Mandrake's using ext3.

Once your Linux is installed, you MIGHT find that your distro didn't 
autodetect the presence of the Windows partition and when you reboot you 
may find that GRUB (or LILO, whatever they use) won't "see" Windows as a 
boot option.  If that's the case, there are a bunch of folks here who 
can walk you through editing your GRUB menu.1st or lilo.conf to add the 
Windows partition. 

As far as the Winmodem goes, depending on distro -- it MIGHT be 
autodetected and "just work".  Both Mandrake and SuSE have tried pretty 
hard to include drivers for the popular and common Winmodems.  But don't 
count on it working -- not all do.  What kind is it?  Some Winmodems 
will work with the LinuxAnt commercial drivers from www.linuxant.com, 
but you'll have to get Linux up and running first.  Then fiddle with 
it.  I recommend that, either way -- unless that modem is the machine's 
only way to get to the Net.

There's still some pitfalls hiding in here depending on distro, but 
hopefully this information helps -- if you know for sure your images are 
safe and sound (and work) -- you should be able to do pretty much 
whatever you want, and any mistakes would be easy to backtrack away from.

Nate