Dual booting Linux becomes as straightforward as it can be if you understand your hard drive and its partitions and the way separate Os looks and recognizes and displays it for you to view. It's very straightforward to look at the partition table on a Windows motor all you need to do is just double click on the My computer icon. Also you can check the partition table by right clicking on My computer and then click on carry on and then go for Disk Management.
Well how Linux identifies and names your partition will be important
Scsi To USB
For Ide drives Linux recognizes the drives with the name
hd(x)
For Scsi drives Linux recognizes the drives with the name
sd(x)
Where x letter differentiates many hard drives for example if you have two Ide hard drives on your computer Linux will detect the first as hda and the second as hdb. Similarly if you have three Scsi disks on your ideas it will be detected as sda, sdb and sdc.
Now that's how bodily hard drives either Scsi or Ide are detected on Linux, lets also understand the way the partitions are detected by Linux say if you have three Partitions on a your first hard drive it will be detected as
hda1
hda2
hda3
and if you have four partitions on your second hard drive they will be detected as
hdb1
hdb2
hdb3
hdb4
That is as straightforward as it is. This comprehension is foremost and also you will come to know about this once we understand dual boot installation.
Now let's take an example and then start our Linux installation to work as Dual Boot. I will be taking the example of my computer but will not get into the complexity of Quad Boot as on my computer and that may confuse some.
Points to Remember before beginning a Dual Boot Installation:
1) You should have an empty partition at least 10 Gb if you want to setup a Gui based Linux and other vital software. If you have more there is nothing like that.
2) You should never use Auto Partitioning when installing Linux on a Dual boot installation.
3) Make a rough note of the total partition on your hard drive. Like if you have C: D: and E: make a note like below
C: 10 Gb
D: 20 Gb
E: 10 Gb
4) Make sure to setup the Grub on the expert Boot article or else you may have to make a bootable drive say a floppy drive each time you want to logon to your Linux and I don't recommend doing that.
5) setup Linux on the last empty partition
6) Let's get started.
So our assumption is that you have three partitions (if you have two partitions even then you can setup Linux on the second partition in case,granted you are ready to loose anything stored on that second partition) your computer and the partition no three i.e. E: is empty so we will setup our Linux on the last partition empty.
Boot motor from Cd-Rom.
Press Enter to setup Red Hat in graphical mode.
Click Next.
Language option --> English (English)
Click Next.
Select Keyboard --> U.S. English.
Click Next.
Disk Partitioning Setup:
Choose manually partition with Disk Druid.
Click Next.
Here you will observation the hard drive names I referred to in the start of this page.
So per our assumptions you will see:
/dev/hda1 Windows Fat 10237 (that's for 10Gb)
/dev/hda2 Windows Fat 20480 (that's for 20Gb)
/dev/hda3 Windows Fat 10237 (that's for 10Gb)
You have to delete the third partition /dev/hda3 and start choosing on the following : -
Amount of Swap for the system?
The total whole of Swap partition to be give to the ideas is all the time double the ready Ram. Say if you have 256mb of Ram the Swap partition will be 512mb and if you have 1Gb Ram your Swap will be 2Gb.
Note: Swap space is used by the Operating ideas when main (Ram) memory fills up. The Os just swaps and puts the processes that are inactive but still using Ram in the Swap memory so that main memory is freed up for the ideas to use for the current running process.
Do you want supplementary partitioning of the drive?
Here I would like to take you to a view of the type of partitions available
/boot this should be not more than 100mb so that's enough.
/home depends on how many users will be using the ideas if you are the only user then 1Gb will be more than enough this is like My documents in Windows.
/ If you don't want supplementary partitions just assign all the ready space to this partition.
However I would recommend you to make only one partition initially and once you understand more on Linux installation by your feel then start supplementary partitioning.
So also only Swap space and / partition will start the next steps of your installation
Highlight the /dev/hda3.
Click on Delete
Highlight the /dev/hda
Click on New.
Fill in the following information
File ideas Type: Swap
Allowable Drives: hda (Make sure hda is checked)
Size (Mb) 512 (Leave as is)
Choose Fixed Size
Click Ok
Click on New.
Fill in the following information:
Mount Point: /
File ideas Type: ext3
Allowable Drives: hda (Make sure hda is checked)
Size (Mb) (Leave as is)
Choose Fill to maximum permissible size.
Click Ok
So now our partition table looks some what like this
dev/hda1 Windows Fat 10237 (that's for 10Gb)
dev/hda2 Windows Fat 20480 (that's for 20Gb)
dev/hda3 / ext3 9725
dev/hda4 swap 512
So here we are ready with our partitioning.
Click Next to continue install. go for the boot loader and let it be prime to load the boot loader on the expert Boot Record.
And continue with the installation as the main part is done you may not face any supplementary difficulties installing the unit from here. Also as we have prime the installation to be on a ideas on a partition with more than 10Gb of space there should be no problems
Even if you settle to setup all the packages under the option box Defaults ready for installation you will not find any difficulties but all the time you can check and select Customize the set of packages to be installed as this may setup the ideas faster.
That's all for the lessons for Linux installation for Dual boot. If you are victorious with this installing Linux on standalone will be like a evening walk. So that's all for now will continue with more stuff as Linux is fun to learn.
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