setting up duel boot

[computeerrgghh]

hi im a looking to install Gentoo onto my thinkpad 2378FVU... I have burned the recovery cds but im not 100% confident about reformatting and then installing windows again.. is there a way to keep windows and still make the partition... if so can somebody please give clear directions..TIA

[Volker]

The recovery process is quite smooth, you will not encounter any problems there. But if you are not comfortable reinstalling windows then you should try a linux distribution thats easier to install than gentoo

[computeerrgghh]

my only problem is that sometimes even after burning cds, they get corrupted but also about reformatting, i havent dealt with IBM recovery CDs before so I dont know if they allow for separate installation of the features rather than dumping everything at once and im not sure if it will require a separate partition for the quick recovery stuff, I have used gentoo before but that was one my own custom PCs that i had just reformatted and i had the retail copy of XP

[computeerrgghh]

ive been looking and i have a spare hard drive and i can get a hard drive enclosure for it... then can i reformat and have the laptop be able to boot from it, if i installed gentoo on it?

[Obs]

I'm dual booting gentoo and xp on a t40 and the windows install was painless.

You can either try resizing the windows partition or reinstall windows on a fat partition that you setup via fdisk. I'd think it'd be easier to just unlock the encrypted restore partition, reformat via fdsk, and setup a fat partition for windows. I took an extra step in the install to make sure that the windows partition did not convert to ntfs.

Go with linux on the spare if you are concerned about the recovery process, or if you want to dual boot, then test the recovery cds on the spare drive.