Reality Me

Dual Booting Windows and Linux

Written by

Doug McCaughan

in

,

Quick lesson learned while installing Edubuntu: If you install Edubuntu then Windows, Windows will eat the boot manager and Linux will not boot. Use these steps:

  1. Partition your drive for Windows, Linux and boot mgr/swap. I personally divided the bulk of the harddrive evenly with an ext3 partition and an ntfs partition. The remaining space (roughly 1.5mb) I left for the Linux installer to play with.
  2. Install Windows into the ntfs partition. Doing this first will give the Linux installer the ability to see that Windows exists and it will do two things. One, it will add a link to the desktop to allow browsing of the Windows partition from Edubuntu, and two, it will add Windows into the grub boot manager.
  3. Install Edubuntu making sure to not format the ntfs partition (manually edit the partition table when it gives you the chance!) and you are done!

Comments

3 responses to “Dual Booting Windows and Linux”

  1. jonathan hickman Avatar
    jonathan hickman

    Dual booting windows and linux has been a goal of mine for several years now.

    But every time I start looking into it on an existing computer, I run screaming.

  2. AT Avatar
    AT

    Man, dual booting is a bad idea. Yeah, it’ll work, but I’m a one or the other kinda guy.
    I haven’t dabbled with Linux, but I’m thinking about making a Myth PVR, so I’ll probably install Knoppix or whatever it is…

  3. djuggler Avatar
    djuggler

    So far the dual boot has been about making sure he could do all that he needed to do. I expected Linux to fall short. I have been wonderfully surprised. He is taking to the Linux environment, interacting with other machines running Windows on the network, instant messaging with no problem using Gaim, and so forth. I’m very impressed!

    But the dual boot causes no problems, only gives flexibility. Primarily when he wants to play a game not supported by Linux he’ll boot to Windows. If he has data on the windows partition, it can be read (and written I think–not tested) by Linux.

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