successful with dual booting! And instructions on how to do this

[Daniel Dalton]

I successfully setup my laptop to dual boot windows and linux.
For anyone who is interested this is what I did.
Its actually quite easy.

1. First I booted the livecd and backed up with dd:
dd if=/dev/hda of=/.../whatever.img
Do hda so you can restore the whole disk and hda1 to mount.
So I had two back ups.

2. I went into windows and ran a disk defrag
3. I then rebooted the livecd and ran the installer.
The installer could not do my partitions or resize because I had fs 
errors...
So I stopped the installer and was back at my gnome desktop on the livecd.
4. I ran gparted and tried to resize.
It told me the exact problem and it was just that the ntfs volume had 
errors...
Gparted isn't accessible, although you could use ntfsresize gparted is 
easy to use and a sighted person figured it out in 2 minutes.
So i just got sighted help.
5. i found this command off the net and ran it from with in windows
chkfsk c: /r
Dunno how it works, but on next boot it fixed all the errors!

6. i booted into ubuntu livecd and resized the partitions.
You just click on resize with the hda1 partition selected or whatever 
partition windows is on and I typed in a new size in mb.
It won't let you make it to small...
I did this with gparted.
7. That worked and i booted the installer by clicking on the install 
option on my desktop
I told it to install to continuous free space.
After about 15 minutes I had a dual booting system!

I didn't lose any data either.

The other thing I was going to say if you want to do this with 0 sighted 
help you could
- Learn to use ntfsresize and resize that way
- Find a distro with an accessible installer

And then have a windows screenreader available...
And that's about all there is to it.
A lot simpler than i thought.

Thanks to everyone that helped me with this,

-- 
Daniel Dalton

http://members.iinet.net.au/~ddalton/
d.dalton at iinet.net.au