Dual boot NT and Linux

[K.C. Chan]

All,
I have done dual boot before, but it was alsways windown first then Linux. But I have a box which has Linux install first, and my boss wants to add NT to it. How do I do this with out wiping out Linux? Thanks.

[Eric Ladner]

If the disk has some free space on it, you can just crank up the installer and point it at the empty space (create a drive in it first).

By far, the easiest way is to add a new hard drive and install on that. Then, you can do a bios number switch at boot time with lilo to fool NT into thinking it's the primary disk instead of the secondary disk.

Give a shout back if you want lilo examples.

If you want to stick with one disk, you'd need some utility like Partition Magic that can resize volumes to make some space for the NT drive, then install as normal.

Just make REAL sure you are not asking the NT installer to format your Linux partition. You probalby have 3 partitions right? /boot, swap and /. That will show up in the installer as a foreign OS drive (if memory serves). Any blank space can be turned into a drive in the installer or beforehand with fdisk (in which case it'd show up as the C drive)

[Bjoern Myrland]

Assuming you don't have any free space to install NT on, you can use the linux tool parted for resizing linux filesystems, before using fdisk to add partitions.
Search for parted at http://rpmfind.net.

Another option is to install the linux version of 'vmware', a tool for creating a virtual machine where you can install whatever OS you choose. No need to resize filesystems, as long as you have enough free space on existing ones. Free 30 days trial version can be downloaded from: http://www.vmware.com/

[Martin Burnett_2 · Accepted solution]

Hello,

If you want to run both Operating systems simultaneously I would recommend that you look at a product called VMware. http://www.vmware.com/
It allows you to run any version of Windows on top of Linux. This is especially useful in test or production environments, users can access both systems at the same time, and you can even run multiple instances of Windows. I have found that Windows is more stable in this environment and performance actually improves.

If you do still need to dual boot, check out the HOWTO:
http://www.linuxdoc.org/HOWTO/Linux+Windows-HOWTO/index.html

Follow the steps for installing Windows after Linux is already installed.