Dual boot

[danbo]

I am currently TRYING to make a dual boot with :

Windows 2000 Pro
Redhat linux 8.0

now i read somewhere that Linux doesn't support dual booting if the othe OS uses NTFS, is this true ?

When making my dual boot would i need to make two equal paritions on my hard drive and then install win 2000 on the first then linux on the second ?

[Dolda2000]

Dual booting has nothing with filesystems to do, it's only that linux has no official write support for NTFS, so you can read from the NTFS partition in linux, but you can't write to it. That's because Microsoft keeps NTFS a closely guarded secret, so everything that has with it to do has to be reverse-engineered. (Windows can't read linux filesystems at all)
Anyway, you'll still be able to boot even if the filesystem on the windows partition is NTFS. A tip could be to put in a FAT partition that both windows and linux can write to, to be able to transfer files from linux to windows, if you'd ever need that.

The partitioning can be a little tricky. If you're lucky, you just need two partitions, one for windows and one for linux. Remember to put windows on the first one, though, or it will fail, since its boot sector code only uses 100% compatible IBM PC features. (Yes, that means that windows' boot sector code could be over 20 years old, which it probably is)
If your BIOS is buggy or old or the like and doesn't have good LBA support, you'll need a boot partition for linux, though. That must be put as the first partition on the drive and be like 50 MB or so. It will only contain the files needed to boot the system (such as the GRUB config file and the kernel itself). The reason it must be first is because BIOSes without LBA support can't read further into the disk than 1.6 GB or something around there. I don't remember exactly where.
Since it's so small, it won't disturb windows either.

Just remember to use GRUB as your boot loader.

[coshea120]

I'm gunna go a bit off subject. Dolda, I was just wondering why you prefer GRUB. Why not LILO? Any particular reason? I'm not attacking GRUB or defending LILO, I'm just curious.

[wassy121]

I choose grub for it's configurability. You can go to a command line in there and actually get pertinent information if it fails. Also, you don't need to re-install it once it is in the bootloader, all you do is change the config, whereas lilo you have to run lilo every time you change the config, and seriously sometimes I couldn't get the lilo to install on the right disk, and it pissed me off something fierce about 2 years ago. Been using grub ever since.

[Dolda2000]

Also you don't have to worry about the drive being LBA capable and such stuff since it detects capabilities and geometry and stuff on boot, and even more importantly you don't have to rescue every time you recompile your kernel and forget to update LILO and everything. Of course, file system handling is really overkill in a boot loader, but I must admit that it's really useful.
It's just better, really. I don't think LILO offers anything that GRUB doesn't.