Boot help

[sandman72]

Praveer, Windows 7 has a shrink option in the storage administration. Use that, so you can be certain that the shrink operation does not mess up anything. The parted way works fine but you have to know a bit what you're doing. Luckily, there's a lot of pages around giving instructions for it.

The install itself is very safe, so it's not likely you would delete your Windows unless you really mean to.

[Praveer]

Well could you please link to such a tutorial?

I am new to all this

[Bazu135]

I can't help with the Windows 7 storage admin option, but if you do want to use gparted, this appears to be a good tutorial. As I said, if you do it this way, I'd strongly suggest backing up your files first!

- Boot LiveCD
- Shrink Windows partition
- 'Apply' changes (I prefer to do these one step at a time, to be safe)
- Create new partition in unallocated space (I believe Fedora uses ext4 format)
- 'Apply' changes
- Install Fedora on new, empty partition (it'll likely be called hda2 or sda2)
- Enjoy!

[sandman72]

Bazu's link for gparted is good.

On windows 7, you go to Control Panel -> System and Security -> Create and format hard disk partitions. A window titled "Disk management" opens. There you'll see your partitions, and with the right mouse button you get the context menu -> Shrink Volume.

I've used it on quite many preinstalled laptops, works very nicely. After shrinking the volume you run Fedora setup and with defaults it uses the available free disk space.

[Praveer]

Ok so I shrink drive c right? The one on which windows is there?

[Bazu135]

Technically speaking, you shrink the partition that your C drive is on - but yes, to all intents and purposes, you're shrinking your C drive.

[Praveer]

Thanks sir

[Golf4Fun]

Sometimes Windows is happier being reduced by it's own tools. I suggest using the built in Disk Management tool in Windows 7 to shrink the main Windows partition and creating free space.

You can right mouse click on the Computer icon [or Computer in the start menu] and select Manage and find disk management in there. Right mouse click the Windows drive and select Shrink.

My own preference is eliminating Windows but not everyone wants to do that.

[Praveer]

Thanks all for guiding me

[Praveer]

Well to make bootable USB we need to format it to NTFS?