Setting up a dual boot

[beetlebailey79]

I know there are many threads out there related to this but none of them are my situation and since I am pretty new to this whole thing, I don't feel comfortable following something that is "close" to what I am doing. Hopefully, someone can help me out. I have a laptop with one HD that I want to dual boot XP and FC6 on. I don't know a lot about GRUB so I don't want to mess it up. (General question first, is GRUB on the rescue disc or on the installation disc?) Can someone walk me through this please? I really like FC6 but not proficient enough to rely on it entirely yet. Thanks in advance.

[Seve]

Hello:
First,
There are probably thousands of posts which mirror you situation to a tee. :)
That being said I understand you apprehension. :)

For starters:

Where are you at now ?

Do you have either OS installed at the moment ?

Also,
Grub is part of the installation disc and can also be re-installed if need be by either using the rescue disk or the installation disk.

Seve

[beetlebailey79]

Seve,

I figured you were probably right about someone (or many) postings like mine but I probably read about 20 or more and they all seem to veer off into something else...two hard drives, opposite OS already on etc... anyway, here is where I am:

I have discovered that having FC6 already installed won't allow me to do a dual boot with XP so I have a fresh install of XP on here now just not exactly sure how to proceed.

Thanks for responding!

[Seve]

Hello:
Right or wrong :) windows does not like to be second.
As such, you need to / should install windows first.

If, when you installed windows, you left some free [meaning un-partitioned space] on your hard drive then you should be good to go.
As, Fedora will use the free space [un-partitioned] to install. During the installation process, Fedora will install grub [the boot loader] to the mbr of your drive [likely /dev/sda].
Once it's completed, then reboot and you should be good to go.

If you installed windows and used [partitioned] your whole hard drive, then you have a couple of options.
You can re-size the ntfs partition to create some free space [Firewing1 has a how-to located here] The newb's guide to installing Linux and resizing NTFS (http://forum.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=92701)
or
You can re-install windows, using it's installer to partition a portion of your hard drive as C:\ leaving the remainder as un-partioned free space,which Fedora will use for it's installation.

Seve

[Generalsniper]

is there any way to delete the dual boot (linux) if i changed my mind?