How-to Dual Boot Windows XP and Fedora or Red Hat Linux

How-to Dual Boot Windows XP and Fedora or Red Hat Linux

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Introduction

I'm far from a Linux expert, but I have managed to learn enough about it to be dangerous, and maybe even helpful on occasion. So I thought I'd put together a little on How to install Red Hat/Fedora on a system that already has Windows XP on it.

My suggestion to anyone wanting to dual boot Windows and Linux is to use two separate hard drives; one drive for Linux, and one drive for Windows. This just makes things easier, though it's really not any harder on system with one drive and multiple partitions.

Like I said, this guide is going with the assumption that you already have Windows installed, and that it resides on a separate hard drive than what you will be using for Linux.

Pre-Install Notes

**Note #1: It is highly recommended that you read through this entire guide at least once prior to using it as a reference while installing Fedora.

**Note #2: Red Hat has their own guide on how to configure a dual boot system, it can be found here. Red Hat's guide is more technical and less graphical than this guide is intended to be.

**Note #3: It is highly recomended that you back up any and all data before attempting to install Red Hat or Fedora Core 1.

**Note #4: This guide uses Fedora Core 1 for examples and screenshots. There is little differance in the install of Fedora Core 1 and Red Hat Linux 9.0.

Obtaining Fedora/RedHat

The first thing we want to do is download the Red Hat or Fedora Linux Operating System, you can follow this guide using Red Hat 9 or the Fedora Core 1. You can download Red Hat 9 directly from Red Hat, or get it off of one of the mirrors, and likewise you can download Fedora Core 1 from the Fedora Project or via one of the many mirrors.

Getting Fedora Core 1 

The CDs for Fedora should be located in /pub/fedora/linux/core/1/i386/iso/ on any of the FTPs you visit. You'll probably see several different files once in that directory, looks for these three files:

yarrow-i386-disc1.iso (md5sum: 76ef22495d186580e47efd8d7a65fe6b) 

yarrow-i386-disc2.iso (md5sum: fd23fe32fafe7557f5d1fa1d31100580) 

yarrow-i386-disc3.iso (md5sum: 6a26b34069639d0c31465d4079a8e1b2)

Yarrow is just the "code name" for Fedora Core 1, much the same way Microsoft has used "code names" for the Operating systems (i.e. Janus, Chicago, Memphis, Cairo, Odyssey, Whistler, Longhorn, etc.).

Getting Red Hat 9 

The CDs for Red Hat 9 should be located in /pub/redhat/linux/9/en/iso/i386/ on any of the FTPs you visit. You'll probably see several different files once in that directory, looks for these three files:

shrike-i386-disc1.iso (md5sum: 34048ce4cd069b624f6e021ba63ecde5) 

shrike-i386-disc2.iso (md5sum: 6b8ba42f56b397d536826c78c9679c0a) 

shrike-i386-disc3.iso (md5sum: af38ac4316ba20df2dec5f990913396d)

Just as Yarrow was the "code name" for Fedora Core 1, Shrike is the code name for Red Hat 9. Each version will have a different code name, you'll get use to it in time. ;)

The other files found in the FTP directories are the SRPMS or source code. If you are just starting out, you won't need to mess with those for a while. ;) Once you have finished downloading the CDs, you'll obviously need to burn them to disk. The files are in an iso CD image, so you can burn them using Nero, EZ CD Creator, or whatever CD burning program you like.

Installing Fedora

Once the files are burnt to disk, it's time to put CD 1 back in the drive and reboot the computer. Assuming you have a bootable CD-ROM, and have the drive enabled as a bootable drive, you should see a screen asking how to install Fedora.

At the boot: line, you can pass parameters here depending on your system and hardware. A list of available boot options can be found here.

I don't have to pass anything to installed Fedora on my system, so I'll just hit to install in graphical mode. Enter any of the parameters into the boot: line and then hit .

You'll then see some text fly by as Fedora probes (think plug-and-play here, not aliens) your system hardware. Hopefully some of the information looks familiar. Like your CD/DVD drives, Hard Disk, etc.

 

After that you should you should see a screen that appears that allows you to check the CD's for errors, or skip and proceed with the install. This is a nifty little feature that I wish Microsoft would incorporate with Windows installer. I can't count how many times, I've tried to install Windows only to find that the CD was unreadable during the last 5 min of the install. � That's enough of that, I'll try and stay away from the reasons I like Linux more than Windows during the rest of this article.

Either check your CD, or skip on to the install, and we'll see the Anaconda installer starts up, which is Red Hat's system installer.

If all went well, a nice graphical installer screen should have come up welcoming you to the Fedora Core. Click Next.

You're first choice is to select the language used during the install process. Chose English (or whatever other language you want) and click next.

Next we get to select the appropriate keyboard type for the system. If you don't know what keyboard type you have, select U.S. English and click next.

The next item to select is the mouse. If the system was able to probe your mouse, the correct option should be listed. If you connect to a KVM switch, the probe will probably be unsuccessful and you'll want to manually select what type of mouse you have. In my case, I have an unsupported mouse and have it connected to a KVM, so I'll select Wheel Mouse (PS/2) from the generic list. Select your mouse, and click next.

The third thing we get to configure is the monitor. Just like the mouse and keyboard if the system was able to probe your monitor successfully, it'll be selected. Otherwise you'll need to select your monitor from the long list of models. In my case, I'm using a Generic CRT display 1600x1200. Chose your monitor value and click next.

Now that the keyboard, mouse, and monitor have been configured, we are asked what type of install we want to do. The options are: 

- Personal Desktop

- Workstation 

- Server 

- Custom

For those of you installing Fedora for the first time, I would suggest you just go with the Personal Desktop option. As you get more failure with Fedora/Linux you can go back and experiment with the other options. The custom option is exactly what you would expect. It allows you to select each and every component that gets installed. So, we are just going to select Personal Desktop and click next.

In order to install Fedora the Hard Disk is going to have to be formated with a Linux partition. We have the option of allowing the Fedora installer to partition or to do it manually. We'll let Fedora do it, so just click next. Don't worry, we're not going to erase Windows.

The next screen ask us what drives we are going to use for our installation. You should also see a box that list several drives that you can (un)select.

I'm sure some of you are probably asking what the heck hda and hdb are. These are your hard drives. hda is the primary master, and hdb is the primary slave. If we had more hard drives, they would be hdc, hde, and so on.

As I mentioned at the start of this guide, we are configuring a dual boot system with Windows installed on one hard disk (hda), and Fedora Linux to be installed on the 2nd disk (hdb). Since Windows was installed on the first disk (hda), we obviously don't want to over write it when we install Fedora (hard to dual boot with only one OS :p), we will uncheck hda. This tells Fedora to only use hdb for the install.

If the hard disk you are installing Fedora is unpartitioned/formated, don't worry about any of the top options. If you have the disk formated with NTFS, FAT32, FAT16, or anything else, select Remove all partitions on this system. Don't worry, it doesn't really mean ALL partitions, it's only talking about those on the hard disk we selected.

Also, we want to check the box below that says Review and Modify the partitions, so select that and click next.

Since we selected the review and modify box on the last screen, we get a nice little display of the hard drives layout. Even though we told Fedora not to use hda in the install, information about that drive, and all other drives is still displayed.

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Posted in: Dual Boot, Linux, XP