[Durham] dual boot install strategy and order

[Richard Mortimer]

On Tue, 2010-01-26 at 15:47 +0000, Dougie Nisbet wrote:
> It's a long time since I've dual booted a PC. But I've ordered a bigger 
> hard drive for my laptop and expect it RSN. I will install XP and Ubuntu 
> (Karmic).
> 
> Any thoughts on tactics? As I say, it's been a while, and I used to 
> hand-tune LILO to get things the way I wanted. Grub seems to be the 
> default boot loader installed so I'm inclined to stick with that.

> I assume the order is:
> 
> 1. Partition and format
> 2. Install OS 1
> 3. Install OS 2
> 
> I don't intend having separate file systems on separate partitions. I 
> think perhaps install XP first, then Ubuntu? Thoughts? How to partition. 
> XP install disk?
> 
>From memory - I may have been dreaming but...

Just let XP install how it wants to and then pop the Karmic install
media in. Karmic will happily repartition your disk to create space for
itself and will setup grub so that it includes XP in the boot menu.

I've resized/repartitioned NTFS drives a few times and it seems to work
quite nicely. If you are doing a clean install of XP then the only risk
you run is having to reinstall if it breaks - but I don't think it will!



> This all assumes that the new disk works! And if it does, I shall have a 
> spare 2.5" Fujitsu drive 80GB that may be looking for a new home. 
> (Though actually when I checked the location and ease of swapping the 
> disk out I couldn't believe how easy it was. I might even keep it as a 
> spare in case of disk failure or with another distro on it)
> 
ebuyer or similar sell usb drive caddies for about £7. Get one of those
and you have an extra external disk with no need for taking the main
drive out.

> On another note I have an external USB hard drive formatted as EXT4. 
> Works great. I had wanted to format it VFAT but found that it choked on 
> a lot of linux file names (especially long photo names) and I couldn't 
> use tools such as rsync so I went with EXT4. It's a shame because it 
> means I can't read it Windows boxes. Or can I? Any utilities that might 
> do the magic?
> 
Slightly off topic but take a look at deltacopy. its a windows port of
rsync. I use it to backup my parent's laptop. I just set the deltacopy
job up to rsync 10 minutes after the laptop is booted. Works nicely.


> can't make the feb meeting btw as I'm on holiday. Was I the only person 
> that turned up in December? How did Jan go? see you in March!
> 
> cheers,
> 
> Dougie
> 
> 
> 
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