[wellylug] Dual boot setting up partitions - Newbie Linz

[Lindsay]

Thanks Phillip.  I went to the sites suggested.   Forums I'm not into,
but the other gave me only knowledge I've gained by experience of
installing Mepis earlier.

As it is my wife's PC, I've decided not to reinstall Mepis although it
is still on there in the ext3 partition.
I have her XP running now as she wants it and I'll leave it at that.  I
run Ubuntu on my Internet connection PC for security reasons, but have a
further PC with XP on which I run programs I have developed over the
years myself in Visual Basic.  I'm keen to have a go at Python, but
littler time to experiment yet, nor do I know anyone who uses it that I
get a few clue from.   My sixty years have been packed with learning and
I don't intend to stop.
Linz

On Sun, 2005-04-10 at 22:09 +1200, Phillip Rose wrote:
> I'm going to wade in here, and I hope that someone else will add their 2¢.
> 
> At 11:55 10/04/05 +1200, you wrote:
> >I have a PC that Ubuntu destroyed bu XP partition on and I have
> >installed Mepis with the aim of getting it re-partitioned.
> >However qtparted shows the Xp partition hda1 as free and hidden.
> >Even though I have selected this partition under operations all
> >operations are greyed-out accept Properties which doesn do much.
> 
> I haven't seen this problem before. Is this the same for all partitions?
> 
> >I have to reactivate that partition as XP which just not go on any other
> >partition no matter how hard I try.   I have created anther NTFS
> >partition by it will not go on that.  I have tried Fdisk with DOS and it
> >wont change it.
> 
> DOS fdisk cannot see Linux partitions, or maybe even Windows partitions
> that Linux has somehow interfered with.
> 
> >  I would prefer is as FAT32 but cant even do that.
> >
> >Some idea's please.   This has been an on going problem for two months
> >at least now.
> 
> It sounds like that partition is hosed. I suggest you start from scratch,
> reformatting your drive. Boot your computer from the MEPIS live CD, log in
> as root and you should be able to format your drive(s) exactly as you want
> them from there using qtparted. I have found cfdisk easier to use than
> qtparted because the help is better. Win XP requires NTFS for installation.
> 
> Basically, you want to "pre-format" your HDD so that Windows will only see
> and use the part you want it to, then install Windows, THEN install Linux.
> 
> What I did with my 60GB laptop hdd was format it 20GB NTFS, 20GB FAT32, and
> 20GB ext3. The first OS you should install is Windows, and it will only see
> the 20GB NTFS partion. Next, install MEPIS or whatever, and it will
> automatically live happily with your Windows installation. The reason for
> the FAT32 partion is to have a partition that both OSs can write to.
> 
> I suggest you do some reading about this process (I'm sure you have
> already!), but here are some suggestions:
> http://www.mrbass.org/linux/mepis/installmepis/
> http://www.mepis.org/forum/4
> There are lots of Qs and As in the latter. You may have to get a username
> in order to see the forums.
> 
> Good luck!
> 
> --Phillip
> 
>