N00btacular question. Dual Booting FC6 with XP

[schnabel_87]

I'm running XP on a HP notebook. I have a 100 GB HD with about 40GB free space.

I want to be able to boot XP or Fedora Core 6 from start-up. I'm currently downloading the distribution on BitTorrent and will burn it to DVD. Only problem is - I have no clue how to go about installing.

Why do I want to install FC6? Bored of Microsoft and curious about Linux.

Little help?

Thanks.

[savlamar]

Is the free space all in an unused partition or part of your existing C: or D: drives?

If it's part of your existing drives, you may need to install partition magic to create a new partition for Linux from the free space, but remember to backup your data files first.

After that you should be able to set up a dual boot system. There are lots of dual boot resources on the web that can show you how to do it.

[Schotty]

The easiest way to dual boot is to:

Repartition. If this means wiping windows, then back up, blow out the drive and repartition

Install Windows into a partition.

Install your choice in Linux. FC6 is a good choice however the installer is bugged and there is a fix for when you are done. Not a huge deal, just prevents a few drivers from getting loaded for Wifi cards and video.

Done. When you boot up, it will give you a menu as to what OS to boot and you can select windows or linux. I would install XP with FAT32 if possible, and install an ext3 filesystem reader to be able to see your linux partitions. Linux will be able to see the fat32 just fine since it is built in, but NTFS is a bit more tricky and dangerous. That requires FUSE, and can hose a drive when things go wrong. Hence the warning.

As for the fix:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Bugs/FC6Common
Its up top, under the Anaconda installs the wrong kernel bug. Takes about 1 minute to fix on a broadband connection via yum.