As my PC seems to be fairly stable – only one crash in 24 hours! – I’m beginning to think about trying out Linux. I’ve bought a copy of RedHat and I’m beginning to clear out one of the hard drives in my machine. But I’m frankly frightened about dual-booting XP and Linux given the fragility of my machine. So I’d like some advice.

Here’s my situation. I have a fresh install of XP on my 120G boot drive. I will have lots of room for Linux on a 60G drive currently formatted as NFTS. I am ok with scraping everything off of that drive and repartitioning and reformatting.

I want to start slowly with Linux. I expect to spend most of my time in Windows for now. That may switch, depending on how things go with Linux. I will continue to have a hell of a lot of data in Windows formats. I also expect to need to boot into XP for some Windows-only apps, including games.

I am wary about monkeying with boot sectors. I will be really really pissed – at no one in particular – if in the course of installing Linux, I end up having to reinstall XP and all of its apps. But I also want a transition path; if (for example) I start off by booting Linux off a floppy, I’d like to be able to boot off a hard drive once I’m feeling more secure. But boot decisions seem to be forever.

So, does anyone have any links that explain it all to me? Or tales of woe and rejoicing?

As ever, thanks.

Categories: Uncategorized dw