Dual boot notebook computer between XP and Linux

Factual Questions
1

I have a notebook computer with XP on a 40 GByte drive that’s failing, and a new 120 GByte arriving probably today. Since I’ll have all that extra space, I’d like to set it up as a dualboot system. Last night I made an image of the old drive using BartPE with the DriveImage XML plugin to store the image on a desktop. I’m fairly confident I’d be able to get the image onto a new 40 GByte partition on the new hard drive and working.

That was all I originally planned to do, but then I thought, with the extra space, I could try installing Linux, which I’ve been meaning to do for the last decade or so.

I’ve been looking at How to dual boot Windows XP and Linux which isn’t quite what I’m doing. I’m going through my home LAN to restore XP onto the new drive, and it’ll take about 3 hours to transfer the data, so I’d like to at least do this part right the first time.

I’ve got the .iso copy of Ubuntu 7.04 they linked to there (it’s only 57 MBytes, which seems kind of small. Is this a full install, or just a Live CD?) which I’ll burn to a CD.

After this, it gets a little fuzzy. I’m thinking I can boot from the Linux CD, set up the partitions I want, and install at least the boot manager. Then boot from the BartPE, and restore the XP image onto its new partition. Then boot from the Linux CD again and install Linux.

I’m not quite sure about the order of partitioning of the new drive. Does this seem reasonable?

??? GRUB Boot manager (I’m not seeing a size for this in my link)
40 GB XP partition
40 GB Data partition (haven’t decided yet if this is shared, or only used by XP)
3 GB swap disk partition
35 GB Linux partition

As long as I’m here, should I consider a different Linux? Ubuntu was just the first link I happened upon. I’d like to have things set up so that, if I do want to try a different version of Linux, I won’t have to touch the XP partition again.

2

Forgot to add: My computer is a Compaq Presario 2200, 3 or 4 years old*, with a 1.3 GHz CPU, and 756 MBytes of RAM. The original RAM was 512, but apart from that, I haven’t made any modifications to what came in the box.

  • Not the older one with the exact same name which only supports 80 MBytes of RAM, that shows up whenever I try to find out how much RAM my computer can use :rolleyes:
3

Install XP FIRST!.

You could partition it with GParted first but then you will need to format the XP partition with NTFS which GParted won’t do for you.

I would format the whole drive for NTFS, Install XP then use GParted to squeeze the XP partition to a size that suits you, then create partitions for /, /swap and /home. It will do the first two by default but the /home can be a life saver. On installation it will ask if you want to keep XP and set up Grub for you.

Linux is much smaller than Windows to start with and you will find more than you imagined on the CD. I have never downloaded it so can’t say definitively what may be on it but on the commercial CDs there is a surprising amount of stuff crammed in there.

One thing I have found with various iterations of Ubuntu is that (assuming you have a permanent internet connection) on of the first things it does is establish a connection with the Ubuntu servers and then compare each package on the CD with the one currently resident on the server and only install the one on the CD if it hasn’t been updated.

If you are to have a shared data partition it will need to be FAT32. Although Ubuntu can read NTFS there are a few reservations about writing to it completely successfully. XP won’t be able to see Linux formatted partitions at all.

If you decide that Ubuntu is not for you, you can overwrite it with another distribution without affecting your XP installation.

Before you make any decisions though, read through the Ubuntu Forums and get a feel for it and the help available. Dozens of people have asked the same or similar questions to yours and the answers to them should be a very accurate guide to how you wish to progress.

4

As to your second post, you should be OK with Gutsy on that - I have an older lower spec machine running it but it is a wee bit sluggish compared to the newer one and you will most likely not be able to run the snazzy new graphics unless you have a decent graphics card with a fair bit of memory built in.

5

I’ve installed linux on several laptops. I have installed slackware, red hat, suse, and fedora, but never ubuntu.

The general procedure is the same no matter what version of linux you use.

  1. Install Windows first. You can install linux first, theoretically, but if you want to keep your sanity you won’t try it. Windows assumes the world is run by microsoft and that no other OS exists. Linux on the other hand is happy to co-exist with Windows.

  2. If you are doing a new install, just partition the disk using windows to partition and format only the windows part of the disk. Leave the rest unpartitioned so that linux can partition it later.

If you aren’t doing a new install, you can use the GNU partition editor to compress your XP partition down to a smaller size. This is theoretically risky, since if anything bombs you just lost your XP partition, but I’ve never had a problem with it.

  1. Once windows is installed, just install linux. Some versions of linux will automatically assign partitions for you, though you can usually go in and edit the sizes that they allocate. If you want a shared partition between windows and linux, it’s best to make it fat32. NTFS is a pain under linux and isn’t worth the hassle, IMHO. I personally always set up a shared partition. It makes your life a lot easier when you want to transfer files from one OS to the other.

That’s basically it. It’s relatively painless, though with all things linux, if something fouls up it can be difficult to get it working right.

This is a good resource: http://www.linux-laptop.net/

Wireless network connections are generally a pain to get working under linux. Other than that, I’ve had to occasionally do some serious futzing to get the display to work correctly, and I’ve had problems getting certain PCMCIA cards to work. Mostly, though, at least on recent laptops, it’s been relatively painless.