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Dual booting WinXP and Fedora Core 5

Published by
Mike
at October 5, 2006 in General and Technology.

Today I decided to tackle a WinXP and Fedora Core 5 install on my Sony PCG-K13. My company uses Fedora as a server platform, and I always wanted to have a server in my office to use and experiment with. I had also always wanted to dual boot my laptop just for fun.

I will admit I was a bit intimidated at the idea at first. So I pulled up del.icio.us and looked for some guides on how to dual boot your computer. I was willing to erase my hard drive for this setup, so I wasn’t to worried about having to try it a few times.

This quick guide assumes you have installed Windows XP and Fedora before

  1. Backup your data. Backup your user data and anything else important, you will be formatting your hard drive.
  2. Boot from your Windows install CD
  3. When you get to the Windows partition page, split your drive up into two segments. My drive is 30GB so I split it in half. It will look something like this once you set it up:
    • C: Partitition New (Raw) 15000MB
    • unpartitioned space 15000M
  4. Select your new C: drive and format it as NTFS and go
  5. Finish the complete Windows install process
  6. Boot from your Fedora Core 5 CD 1
  7. Choose install in graphical mode and start the process
  8. When you get to the Partitioning Options Screen choose:
  9. Use free space on selected drives and create default layout
  10. Check the box for Review and modify Partitioning layout
  11. The next screen will be the Disk Setup Screen. There will be a bunch of things in the window, you should have three volumes
    • a NTFS volume
    • a swop volume
    • a ext3 volume

    and some other stuff, but if you have those you are good to go.

  12. On the next screen you will set the boot loader configuration.
    • Choose Fedora Core if you want your default to be Fedora
    • Choose other if you want it to be Windows
  13. Continue configuring everything to it’s default, add the apps you need and you will be good to go.
  14. Restart and boot Fedora and boot Windows to see if they work
  15. Boot Windows load your anti-virus and anti-spyware applications then run Windows update
  16. Finishing configuring your systems and have fun.