Dual Boot Question - Fedora & Windows XP

[CMPie]

Hello.

I am looking to move to Fedora as my primary OS, but still want to have an XP partition on my machine.

In the installation guide it says that if you want to dual boot you should install XP first.

"If you do not have any operating systems installed on your computer, install Windows first and then install Red Hat Linux."
http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/linux/RHL-9-Manual/install-guide/ch-x86-dualboot.html

Is this true? Is there any reason I should install either OS before the other?

Ahy help you can offer is greatly appreciated.
Thanks.
Mark.

[fvs]

I just installed Fedora Core 5 as my second OS, by first loading XP, then Fedora, It dual boots for both. No problem with that, Lots of luck. fvs ;)

[linuxthuse]

Hello.

I am looking to move to Fedora as my primary OS, but still want to have an XP partition on my machine.

In the installation guide it says that if you want to dual boot you should install XP first.



Is this true? Is there any reason I should install either OS before the other?

Ahy help you can offer is greatly appreciated.
Thanks.
Mark.
It is true!

Windows does not cooperate well with other operating systems (surprise!) and is very likely to rewrite the partition table on a machine where Fedora is already installed such that Fedora cannot understand the partition table and therefore will not boot.

You need to install XP first and then Fedora. Fedora will detect XP during the process and if you choose GRUB as your bootloader you will get an initial GRUB screen with a choice of operating systems to boot (no pun intended).

I haven't installed XP for ages, so can't remember if it allows you to choose partitioning options. If it hogs a whole hard disk, a good way to resize the XP partition so as to make room for Fedora is to use QtParted from within Knoppix. Or you can have more than one hard disk, XP on one etc.

Some people recommend that you choose FAT32 for the XP partition if you're going to have it cohabit with Linux, but I imagine the folks at M$ developed NTFS so that Windows would work better. There is good NTFS support for Fedora, although it's read-only. So maybe have a FAT32 partition somewhere for swapping between Linux and Windows.

Cheers

[CMPie]

Thanks for your help and quick response! Appreciate it.

[pparks1]

Just as a clarification.

You WANT to install XP first on a dual-boot because it can be accomplished in fewer steps.

When you load Windows, it will OVERWRITE the MBR. Therefore, if you load Linux first and put GRUB there and then load Windows, it will OVERWRITE the MBR....thus preventing you from booting Linux.

You can fix this problem, by booting from a Linux rescue disk and then reinstalling grub. Now, you can boot from Linux again.

Therefore, it doesn't REALLY matter which you load first, but to keep things simple you want to install Windows first and then Linux.