Need help dual booting XP/FC 4

[MostNutsEver 0]

I grabbed FC4 off of bittorrent but I realized I have no idea what I'm doing when it comes to dual booting OS's. My computer is a Gateway with a 75 GB HD, 1 gig of RAM. I have a cable internet connection. I know I need to partition my HD but I'm not sure how to do it, and how much space I need to allot for the partition. Any help would be appreciated, thanks.

[danleff 0]

You need to have a plan (see guys and gals, I said it again). I'm glad you asked before moving on.

 

What exact model of Gateway is this?

 

Any reason why FC4 and not FC5? In my opinion, FC5 has been a big improvement and has better hardware detection (hence why I asked what model of Gateway).

 

First, defrag your XP drive before you do anything. This is a good idea for a number of reasons.

 

Then read some directions,...yes directions! Try Fedora Core 4 Installation Notes.

 

Or Fedora's Installation Guide.

 

You don't necessarily need to partition your hard drive, just have some free space on the hard drive.

 

Once you defrag the NTFS partition to move all the stray files in nice order, away from the end of the partition, then you need to resize your partition to creats some free space at the end of the hard drive. Windows XP can do this, or you can use a partitioning utility, like PartitionMagic, or System Rescue CD.

 

Fedora, during the installation process,can also offer to use free space on the NTFS partition, but I recommend having empty space on the end of the drive. This is much cleaner.

 

How much space to leave free at the end of the drive, depends on what you want to do. If you are going to just experiment with Fedora, between 5-10 gigs of space is fine. This should be enough for a reasonable installation of Fedora and to give you some breathing room.

 

Fedora will use the free space on the drive, if you tell it to, in order to make the partitions that you need for it.

 

But please, if you decide to do this, make sure that you have a backup plan. Back up any important files and documents that you have. I don't recommend that a first time user (especially with a Gateway system) do this on their only PC. Fedora is still a little complex and other distros (flavors of Linus) are still more user friendly for new users.

 

Do you have a full installation Windows XP CD?