Dual Booting Fedora

[CoolioG]

I would like to duel-boot Fedora (the newest version) and Windows Vista. Do I have to partition a drive and install to that or.....?

[yancek]

You should be able to do this during this installation. One thing I would suggest is that you defragment your vista partition and then resize (shrink) it from within vista before beginning the install. When you install Fedora you will get several options on how/where to install and if you have important data on the computer and don't understand the option, you are better off stopping and doing some reading until you understand the process. I believe Fedora wil set up a separate boot partition by default as well as a root (system files) partition and swap. I don't use Fedora so I am not sure if it will set up vista to dual boot or if you will need to create that entry manually.

[grishi_111]

When fedora installer begins, it ask you the space you want to install.
You will see Options...
Use entire disk and create default layout (wipes entire hard disk)
Use free space and create default layout (uses free space available)
Remove Linux partition and create default layout (removes Linux partition, if any)
Create custom layout (you need to provide space)
.....and one or two more.
I don't think you have any Linux partition, Creating Custom layout is preferred but it needs more knowledge about partition. You will better off creating a free space by some means(as a Windows
user you should not have any problem doing this) and then choosing
Use free space and create default layout
One thing Fedora adds entry for Windows itself, so you need not worry about
Please let us know if you have more issues.

[CoolioG]

Thanks... im one step closer to being less of a linux n00b with this knowledge

[ryptyde]

Use Vistas disk manager to shrink the ntfs partition and it will create unallocated freespace and that is where you will install Fedora as mentioned in above post "Use free space and create default layout"

If you are installing Fedora 12 it will create a ext4 fs. Vista will be listed as "Other" in the boot menu, you can rename it later. You may find that Vista wont boot when selecting "Other" as you may have a Windows recovery partition that is causing the problem but a simple edit of grub.conf will fix that.

EDIT: I believe Fedora 11 required a ext3 boot partition of 300 MB and the remainder was ext4 for the OS.