installing red hat 9 on a dual boot with xp,ntfs file system,having troubles using bootitng

[Daniel_166]

I want to install redhat9 on my compaq evo d310 which has xp home,ive used bootitng to try and make a new partition non-destructivly but,it wont work with a ntfs file system nor will redhat 9's disk druid work with it.Any other software besides Partition Magic?im looking for open source or freeware software,but i'll take a look at it it doesn't cost much.I was thinking about ntfs resize,but that doesnt do what i want it to do.

[Steven E. Protter]

I am not surprised you are having trouble. In my opinion, Microsoft engineered XP to make it impossible to run a dual boot system without partition magic.

If you are willing, you can follow this procedure which I think will work.

Burn a CD with your XP cab files on it.

Do a Linux 9 installation into a partition(set up by fdsk). Let it control booting with grub and format the second partition for ntfs. Then install XP into that partition after booting into it.

Linux does not discrimiate against Microsoft OS.

Another solution is to simply spend $100 and get another hard disk. One disk for Linux, one for XP.

I personally don't believe in dual booting. Used hardware is so cheap and available, and when I build a box, I want it to be running full time.

SEP

[Daniel_166]

I guess i could just get another drive,like a 20gb or a 30gb one.That might be my only option because i dont want to do all that backuping stuff and reformatting.Or i could get partition magic.By the way,how much is partition magic?

[Vitaly Karasik_1 · Accepted solution]

AFAIK, Mandarke installer can resize NTFS partition

[Jerome Henry]

Hi,

Assuming that you won't download a hacked version of partition magic through a peer to peer network, you'll spend 30 USD for it, which is not that much.

Mandrake partition tool can resize NTFS parititons, but you have good chances that your XP will complain on reboot that system parititoin is altered, and ask you to use recovry console...

hth

J

[Daniel_166]

i ended up using mandrake:)