FC10 dual boot on new XP machine, partitioning

[Robert L Cochran]

Jerry Feldman wrote:
> On 12/07/2008 04:20 PM, tns1 wrote:
>> Dell 1525 laptop
>>
>> This new PC has the following primary partions:
>> A fat16 partition of about 40MB (EISA configuration)
>> A ntfs partition of around 280GB (XP system)
>> An extended partition containing a fat32 partition of 2.5GB
>> (MediaDirect)
>> A fat32 partition of 10GB (DellRestore)
>>
>> Some of these are unfamiliar so I don't know if there are any
>> restrictions on moving/resizing them.
>> If I keep them, it seems like I'd have to more shuffling than I have
>> done before if I am going to add the ususal
>> boot, /, swap, particularly if boot needs to be a primary, and I'd
>> also guess that the EISA partition needs to be
>> primary and stay in the first 1024 cyls much like boot. The system
>> still needs to preserve its original system restore
>> and media direct functionality.
>>
>> I did give the FC10 installer a try, but it is not up to the task of
>> automatically resizing and moving partitions, so
>> I am using gparted on a Knoppix CD to do the heavy lifting.
>>
>> 1) Does anyone know what restrictions there are on moving/resizing
>> the existing partitions above?
>> 2) What would be the simplest workable partitioning for dual boot?
> I generally run several linux installfest per year. The way I set up
> dual boot is:
> 1. resize the existing Windows XP.  (partition 1) NTFS
> 2. Sometimes Windows uses a second partition. That can be resized also.
> 3. The next physical partition I set up as extended, and use the rest
> for Linux:
>    1. Swap - 2 or 3X memory.
>    2. Root - maybe 10 - 20 GB
>   3. Home - any size you need
>
> In your specific case, I would let the Fedora partitioner allocate the
> root and home partitions. You would probably need to reduce the size
> of the XP partition.  Neither /boot nor swap need to be primary.  In
> the past on my old system, partition 1 was always the extended and
> everything was a logical partition. The reason for /boot to be a
> separate partition is that the MBR needs to be able to point directly
> to the stage2 in /boot, and on large drives you want to make sure it
> is somewhat close to the beginning. I don't recall the number of
> cylinders off hand.
>
> Another thing that I am recommending for new multi-core systems is not
> to resize at all, but to use virtualization so you can have both
> Windows and Linux running at the same time. I have Windows XP
> Professional and Windows Vista Ultimate running under KVM/QEMU on my
> desktop with Windows XP Professional as the guest OS on my laptop
> under Virtualbox.
>

I'm going to be joining the virtualization parade in a few minutes,
doing pretty much this. You need a processor with hardware
virtualization extensions to run under KVM. There is a how-to here
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Virtualization_Quick_Start

Note that for laptops, you may have to go into the BIOS and actively
turn on virtualization support before you install. That is what I had to
do with my Dell Latitude E6400. Later today, I will actually do the
installation process.

Bob