On 6/4/07, Mike McCarty <Mike.McCarty@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Andras Simon wrote: > I used gparted from the Fedora 7 Live cd to create several partitions > on my hd; sda1 for XP, the others for various Fedoras.(I used the > Live cd for this so that I could also use badblocks on the linux > partitions and label them.) After installing XP in its partition and > then booting the Live cd again, fdisk showed one less partition (the > original sda2, a small boot partition, was gone), parted complained > about overlapping partitions, and gparted didn't show any. [snip] > So my question really is: is there something to keep in mind when > partitioning a drive for XP/Fedora dual boot? I am not an XP install expert. However, this is what I have observed, FWIW. Most Microsoft products act as if they are going to be the only program which does any particular task, and cheerfully set themselves to be the default, or even the only, program for that task. WinXP is no exception to this rule. I believe WinXP creates a "rescue partition" in which it saves certain information so that, should things get mess up badly, it can get back to a bootable state. This may be the problem. I'd go back to a state in which there was NO MBR, zero it out, and then create the WinXP partition, and install WinXP. Only after WinXP was happy, bootable, runs, and has left some unused space on the disc, would I try to install Linux.
Thanks for the advice! I'll do this for the final install (right now I'm just experimenting with various setups). For now, I just removed/recreated all but the NTFS partition, and both XP and Fedora7 seems to be happy. Andras
