[NBLUG/talk] dual boot beginner

[Troy Arnold]

On Thu, Apr 07, 2005 at 03:24:35PM -0700, Lynn wrote:
> So I took the advice and went for a newer distribution.  I bought 5 
> disks of suse 9.1 pro.  I stuck in the #1 cd after running scandisk, 
> defragmenting the drive and running suse's memory check.  Things went 
> very smoothly, the hard drive was repartitioned (shows up on fdisk as 
> being changed anyway and my windows 98se now has 5 of a 10 gig hd. But, 
> the package load returned errors on 47 of the packages and the installer 
> would never allow me to do the configuration phase.   I tried 4 times to 
> do the install using the repair tools that came with the disks but the 
> installer would never complete the process.  One of the installs said 
> there was no /etc/sysconfig/kernel file and other times it just said 
> unable to complete install.  My small experience with linux is from when 
> red hat 7.2 was brand new and my experience then was that I never had 
> any problems with the linux install.My problem  was  trying to get the 
> windows and linux to get along on the same drive and configuring linux 
> to dial out  or some such thing.  What does this sound like to anyone 
> that would care to respond?  My guess is a faulty install disk. That 
> guess maybe just me not wanting to admit defeat.  I bought the disks 
> online from a place called " love of scents/pcTech101"  and they cost me 
> 9.99.  Thanks....Lynn

I'd guess faulty install media also.  Perhaps a picky cdrom, but hard to
say without another machine or drive to test that media on.

Getting windows and Linux to dual boot and get along really isn't hard
or tricky.  There's just a couple of things to know about.  One of the
major ones being that Windows will always take over the master boot
record and any non Microsoft OS's be damned.  On the other hand, modern
Linux distro's are good (but not perfect) at detecting other OS's and
setting up a boot entry for them.  The other thing is that you can have
what appears to be a catastrophic problem (i.e. non-booting machine or
one or more missing OS's) that is actually really simple to fix with say
a Knoppix CD and a bit of coaching.  Keep that in mind :-)

It's a ways off, but there's an installfest in about a month.  Not sure
if the date has been finalized yet.  If you want to tackle this problem
then, we can get you squared away.


-troy