How to dual boot windows xp & openSUSE 12.1

English Install/Boot/Login
#1

I am sorry if this question has been asked before but what can I use to partition the harddrive & what steps should I take in creating the dual boot so I don’t lose my Windows partition?

I hope I am making sense.

Thank you.

#2

On Thu, 12 Jan 2012 23:26:02 +0000, txaggie9 wrote:

> I am sorry if this question has been asked before but what can I use to
> partition the harddrive & what steps should I take in creating the dual
> boot so I don’t lose my Windows partition?
>
> I hope I am making sense.

The openSUSE installer can resize the Windows partition for you and
handle all of that. There are plenty of threads here that go into more
detail. :slight_smile:

Jim

–
Jim Henderson
openSUSE Forums Administrator
Forum Use Terms & Conditions at http://tinyurl.com/openSUSE-T-C

#3

There will be others far more experienced than I am on this. But I’ll try to help for what I can.

First, make sure you have a backup of whatever you don’t wish to lose on the WinXP drive. If everything else fails, you can always go back to that.

Here’s what I did.

  1. I backed up my data.
  2. Defragment the drive.
  3. Use the Live DVD and the disk management program in it to shrink the WinXP partition. This assumes you’re using only the one drive and not adding another.
  4. Write down what you want for Linux partitions. The default on some linux distributions is to dump everything in only one partition. What I did was to

  • Create a “shared” partition using the NTFS file system. (You get to chose the file system.) This is where I store files I want to keep and share with WinXP. Photos, documents, etc.

  • Create a boot partition. I used 102MB, but the system is only using 78MB of that.

  • Create a root partition. I set mine at 24 GB, but the system is only using 6 GB. So you could set it smaller…but leave some “breathing” room.

  • Create a home partion. I set mine at 25 GB, but I’m only using 16 GB of that. Since I use the “shared” partition" for documents, this doesn’t get used much.

  1. The install program will bring you to a point where you can manually set up your partitions. If you have those partitions written down, it makes the process much easier.

The install program will take care of the rest and will create a boot menu (grub) that allows you to chose which partition to boot into.

What I like about how I did this, is I’ve tried several linux distributions since I started about 9 months ago. In each time I install, I can go into these and set the locations for each installation and not lose any data.

Now…hopefully some far more experienced members will correct anything I said that was wrong and give you some better advice. :slight_smile:

Chris

#4

Whether you need a shared partition as suggested by crypkema will depend on your own ways of working. I never bothered with a shared partition because I never had anything I wanted to use both in Windows and Linux - beyond copying things from Windows into Linux. If that is your situation, you can omit Section 4 and leave openSUSE to decide the partitions itself.

Make sure you enable the MBR and don’t set the hardware clock to UTC - because Windows likes the hardware clock set to local time.