On March 13, 2005 10:52 pm, Paul W. Abrahams wrote:
I've just ordered a Dell notebook computer, an Inspiron 1000 (looks like a bargain at $579 after all the rebates, with free shipping). Of course it comes with WinXP, and of course I want to set it up for dual boot with Linux (SuSE 9.1 for now, probably).
I have several dual-boot machines, but none of them started out with a standalone Win system on them. I remember that the installation DVD has a procedure for this particular case, though. My question is: are there any gotchas I need to know about? I don't want to find out that I've hosed Win in the process of setting up Linux, and then be unable to do anything about it. As an example: is YaST able to cope with the filesystem that typically comes with a new Win system and shorten the partition without corrupting it?
Newer Dells will have a small partition with a ghost image of the factory install, you get at it with crtl-F11 at boot. There may also be a small Fat partition with diagnostics. I've had no problems so far with SuSE resizing the XP partition, and using the NT bootloader to start linux. Just copy the boot sector to a file and point to it in boot.ini. dd if=/dev/hda3 of=linux.boot bs=512 count=1 move the file to a location that XP can reach then add this to boot.ini c:\linux.boot \ "SuSE" -- Collector of vintage computers http://www.ncf.ca/~ba600 Machines to trade http://www.ncf.ca/~ba600/trade.html Open Source Weekend http://www.osw.ca