duel booting with windows XP home edition, and Fedora

[Phil Schaffner]

On Wed, 2005-07-20 at 23:27 -0700, Alex Aguilar wrote:
> Hello!
>  
>  
>           I already have windows XP home edition installed on my pc,
> and I am trying to configure my pc to duel boot between windows XP,

Guess you mean "dual boot" - although the topic may provoke some
dueling! :-)

>  and Fedora, but first I have to install fedora on a seperate
> partition. should this partition be a primary partition, or an
> extended one?

Not clear if you have already made room for Fedora.  One tool is
ntfresize.  Here's some advice from the CentOS list:

> On Thu, 2005-04-14 at 06:10 -0400, ryanag at zoominternet.net wrote:
> Here is the process I do it in:
> > 
> > #1: Install WinXP normally.
> > #2: Use a special liveCD http://www.sysresccd.org/ to shrink the NTFS
> > partition.
> > #3: Use the same liveCD to format the empty space created from #2 with
> > ext3.
> > #4: Install CentOS telling it to remove all linux partitions (it will
> > only touch the ext3 created in #3).
> > 

Could also use a more general live-CD distro such as Knoppix to resize
and partition.

> also I was reading how to install fedore for windows duel boot, and
> I ... Know I am aware that in Linux drives hda1-3 are resurved for
> primary partitions, while 4 is for a single extended parti! tion, and
> 5 on up is for logical drives located with in the extended partition;

4 can also be used for a primary partition if you don't want/need
extended, and conversely extended partition does not have to be 4 - can
be 2 or 3 as well.

As other posters pointed out, shouldn't have to go through all of those
contortions - the installer should handle it OK, but I do second the
advice about having a FAT32 partition for data sharing.  OTOH, a USB
memory stick, USB/Firewire drive, or other external storage may serve
the same purpose.

> but what number should I input into the "x" variable of my commands,
> so that I will not erase windows XP, but yet at the same time still
> have a fully functional linux operating system?

Your windows XP is ALMOST certainly /dev/hda1 (or possibly /dev/sda1),
but displaying the partition table with Linux fdisk (after booting from
a CD distribution as above) should verify that.

Phil