Thank you for responding. This is the best I can do to answer your question. Formulating written answers is not my best thing. There'll be spelling errors and RAM or errors and even dramatic errors in code as I am doing this with dictation, and I talk like I talk very
let's look at your last question. You need to become familiar with how your computer BIOS. In my BIOS there is an option to select which drive if I hit the F8 key before windows can see me hit the F8 key. Kind of confusing. This can be annoying, but it certainly works and it is a practical solution to the problem. Even if it is annoying.
Now then, as to how to partition just one drive, both Linux and Windows and use that drive and share data. Let's suppose I have 160 Gbytes IDE drive that is in good condition but does not have any information that I need. Or at least I have already saved the essential information to DVD discs.
I would first boot in one of my favorite Linux CDs and prepare my drive using the Linux live CD. This is a version of Linux that does not require a hard drive to actually come up and run. It runs from the CD and from RAM. Using the drive utility is inside of Linux I would prepare the drive in the following manner.
Delete any partitions that are already on the drive, and make sure the drive is an MS-DOS type . That should not be necessary, but it is one of those esoteric things that it can really mess you up if it has not been set. Most people are not even aware what this is. Next, I would create a nice size NTFS partition as a primary partition. It should start at the beginning of the drive. Since this is 160 GB drive, let's divide up and into nice 40 GB pieces are in okay, first partition is a primary partition and its 40 GB. Next we create an extended partition that covers almost all the rest of the space. Well, let's leave just a tad. Maybe leave 20 GB of non allocated space. It's not wasted. It's just unallocated. Now inside the extended partition we make some logical drives. Let's start with a nice size that 32 partition. Maybe 30 GB. Next we create a Linux partition using the EXT 3 format. About 40 GB. Last we do a Linux swap of 7GB. let's see, that doesn't take up all the available space. No problem, we can use one of the Linux facilities later to change the size of the partitions.
The order of installation is a critical issue here. We'll have to install windows XP first. You might want to do some of the windows updates and perhaps install just a few of our favorite programs. But it's not necessary to do all that right now.
Next we do the Linux installation. Having less experience with the Linux installation, are likely to do something wrong or did that's one of the reasons we didn't do the complete Windows installation with all of our programs. We could botch up Linus installation to work wipes out the windows XP system.
Now we have to pay attention and do a manual installation of Linux system. In some cases the automatic installation work fine, but we don't really know that. So we have to do go through this thing and manually tell it what partitions to use.
If all goes well, we'll end up with a GRUB menu that asks us if we want to boot into Linux or if we want to boot into Windows. That is about as good as it gets. You can try for a fancier menu that looks nice, but it's just a lot of work to make it look pretty.
So basically, the idea was to our equipartition the disk first, having only one primary partition. By the way, it has to be set active. Now somebody will tell you you don't have to do that. That somebody won't be around when it doesn't work. Just make your primary partition was set to be the active partition. Windows XP is installed first, followed by Linux. After everything seems to be working okay, then we can add more stuff into the Windows system.
If we ever have to repair the windows XP installation, we're probably going to lose the GRUB boot loader. So at some point in time you might want to make a floppy disk that can boot into Linux partition. That's documented somewhere, I used to do that but I forgot how the disk was made. I think you can even get a USB right to do that for you.
Hope this answers most of your questions. I'm dictating this using a program called Dragon naturally speaking. And using Windows &, you'll find a program very similar to this inside of even the Home version of Windows 7 is called the speech recognition.
microphone off
