Dual booting procedures.

[erni3ball22]

Hey, hoping for some quick answers with this one. I'm planning on doing a dual boot with XP, and FC3, I don't have means of money to get partition magic, so I'm looking for a simple program to partition my HD, I have just windows now. So I will back up what I want from my XP installation i'm currently on, partition it, then reformat this windows (have a lot of mp3's I don't want, just wanna new clean slate windows) then I want to install FC4 on the left over space cause I love my linux. So please anyone out there I need some answers, mainly what program can I use for free to partition my 40gb hard drive. thank you

[shams]

if you want to backup your data to another disk use fdisk for partition, while installaion you can use the disk druid for patition of linux read this link .

[daneel971]

Boot you system from Knoppix: it comes with a lot of great linux tools (and later you can install the FC version of all of them) for backup and partitioning like partimage, qtparted and ntfs.resize.
You can even create a small partition on your hd (2,5 Gb) and install Knoppix on it as "emergency system", without booting it from the cd and with the option of adding/upgrading it's software.

[ttgamage]

i have some prob in dual boot XP with FC4. i want to install the boot loader to the first sector of the boot partition(not to mbr) and my ext3 partition is hda9 with swap deing hda10. the windows partition is hda1
after installation i used the linux rescue feature and got the .bin file using dd if=/dev/hda9 bs=512 count=1 of=/dev/fd0/linux.bin and did the nesessary modifications in windows boot.ini too. but now when i try to login to fedora the screen displays GRUB loading stage2.......and nothing happens can some one please help me since i'm desperate to use fedora for some software development.

also anyone having good links to serial port programming in java? pls

[shams]

i thinks your gurb is nor porper installed, reinstall the gurb to the /boot partiotions, for detail read this link .

[ttgamage]

thank u very much for your quick reply. i still didn't try the things on the page u gave me since my problem just got worse. i re installed grub by logging into grub> using linux rescue and using root(hd0,8) followed by setup(hd0,8) where my / is in hda9. but it didn't work either. then i re installed fedora this time by installing the bootloader to the MRB. after that now i can't login to windows too. the worst thing is i can't use the windows setup cd to use fixmbr since the machine just hangs after dispalying windows will now configure your hardware.... or something similar to that i tried every thing i possibly can changing jumpers, boot sequences even master slave arrangements and no result. finally i pluged my hard disk in one of my friends machine and it runs the windows blue screen setup and complains it can't find hard disk.

what i did was i used his machine and my hard drive as slave, backed up every thing i need and completly deleted the partitions. now the windows setup runs(even in my machine) with out earlier complains.

this is my current situation. i need to re-partiton my hard drive and start everything from scratch. definitely i need fedora with windows in my machine for my project work and i will try the same thing again. hopefully i doubt i will end up in the same mess again.

please provide me with further assistance on what shall i do..

most importantly i need to install grub to the first sector of the boot partition and not to the MBR.

please help

[shams]

If the insallation was successful without any problem you can boot the fedora from xp ntldr, read this link .