Dual boot Vista and Fedora 8. Can anyone help me?

Hi

I want to set up a dual boot environment for vista (Home Premium, or Business - probably gonna use business) and Fedora 8.

I have an m1330, I think i just need help with the partitions. I'm willing to wipe everything off. The fedora wizard wants me to create a bunch of partitions, but i don't wanna do that. I just want 2, vista and fedora. When i try to install it on a 10gig partition that i have lying around, it gives me a warning about having a boot partition and then some other ones. And i don't want to use the default settings in the installer as that would wipe everything off my hard drive.

So yeah, anyone have experience installing both. (I erase everything this weekend) but i don't want to spend too much time doing trial and error, if someone can help me out.

If you can help reply here or pm me.

Thanks in advance.

P.S. This might not be the right board for this. If it's not, i apologize. I just like the Dell forum, cuz it's where i hang out, and the people here are pretty friendly.

 

Maybe this thread will help
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=103281

 

I didn't find that post much help. Can anyone else help or point me in the right direction?

 

i've done this several times....it's really quite easy. Using a windows/DOS based partition program (or the admin tools--> computer management-->hard drive stuff), make some space available for format by shrinking down your windows partition. Or, when you install windows, just choose a smaller partition size for it, leaving the left-over alone.

Then, boot off the fedora disk, using it's partition program make a / partition any size you want using the ext3 file system, then a swap partition (if you have 2GB+ RAM, just make this 1-2GB, which is probably even overkill, but smeh), and, if you see the need, a /home partition, but this is not necessary.

Then install fedora, and set it to use Grub as the bootloader...every time i've done it, Grub automatically picks up the vista installation and adds it to the list. If it doesnt, you can choose to add an OS by just choosing the partition on which it is located.

Hope that helps! I dual-boot Vista x64 and Mandriva 2008 on my desktop...but I used to have fedora 8 on there too.

 

Thanks Schmitty.

I screwed around with my other m1330 before reading your post and got things to work . I didn't make a swap partition though. I'll do that when i install fedora on this m1330.

Thanks again for your help *hug*