Dual booting WinXP and Linux on brand new T61

[whizkid]

http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Rescue_and_Recovery

[louieb]

See post #2 short and simple.
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=351692
In depth complete NTLDR and WinGrub
http://users.bigpond.net.au/hermanzone/p9.html

[sbm08]

Thanks guys.

I am going to go ahead with:

a) resizing the Windows NTFS partittion to 75GB
b) FAT32 or NTFS 25GB for shared data
c) Linux partition 50 or 53GB.

I will 1st do a) make sure it boots, then go for b), etc.

If I get into trouble I'll post back.

Thanks to all of you who replied; it is most appreciated!

[whizkid]

You don't need a FAT partition to share data. Linux can read and write NTFS just fine.

Linux likes more than one partition, and some distributions REALLY like to have them. (Swap and boot, particularly.) You might end up with more than four partitions, and that's OK. Windows will ignore them.

[sbm08]

whizkid:

MY plan is to reduce my Windows partition to 75GB from my original plan of 90GBG; and use the extra space to create a 25GB "Data Partition" for my documents and data files that will be accessed by applications under both Windows and Linux. I was originally planning to make that partition FAT32 based on the fact that Linux had trouble with NTFS. But if it is no problem/not dangerous to have Linux read and write to NTFS, I might as well make that 25GB partition NTFS.

One key factor is that ALL my data, documents, Mozilla profiles, etc. will reside on that partition and I would not want to bork it because of problems with Linux and NTFS.....