Re: [opensuse] Fwd: Can't Dual-boot oS 11.0 & Windows Vista?

I run a Linux installfest once a quarter here in the Boston area, and a
number of my installs are dual boots. I generally do SuSE and Ubuntu
installs and the other guys do Fedora. First of all, Windows generally
sets up 2 partitions, with 1 hidden. The first thing I do is to
aggressively defragment Windows. All Windows file systems need
defragmentation. The next thing I do is to resize the Windows primary
partition. (Vista has its own resizing utility, otherwise I prefer to
use either QTParted or Parted from a bootable live distro).

Then, once I have reduced the size of Windows, I boot to make sure it
runs. This is an important step, because the resizing operation itself
can mess things up).

Once Windows is shown to live comfortably in its smaller digs, I then
install Linux, usually in an extended partition, but some people prefer
to put /boot into a primary.

Grub will show 2 Windows boots, but the second one is simply the hidden
drive. This usually contains the restore data.

Once Linux is installed, I again boot into Windows to make sure we can
still boot into it.

Lastly, I may alter the /boot/grub/menu.lst (or grub.conf) to make
Windows the default boot if desired by the client and also to remove
the second Windows boot entry. So far, the only problem I had was with
an ancient Windows 95 system where there appeared some stuff in the
bios.
--
--
Jerry Feldman <gaf@xxxxxxx>
Boston Linux and Unix
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