Installing F12 as a dual boot with win7

guitarguy83 · #1 11th February 2010, 01:37 AM

ok heres the deal. dell sent me a busted inspirion that i hobbled on for about 5 months. i had win 7 on a 500gb drive and was running F12 on a separate drive. it was real easy for me to shut down one swap drives and boot the other no problem. now i have my new one and they upgraded me to a studio model. im not complaining about that, but in order to swap drives i now have to remove the back panel pull the mounting bracket swap reinstall everything and boot it up. just a pain in the ass and takes like 10 minutes. so i have all this space on the win 7 drive and i think i just want to run a dual boot. how big of a partition would you recommend to install F12 and have some extra play room? i wont be installing all of the packages but a good number of them will be going on. also is there a good partition manager you would reccomend thats compatible with win 7? i have already tried easeus and paragon so...NEXT!
thanks for the help guys.

David Batson · #2 11th February 2010, 01:59 AM

I had no problems adding F12 to a Windows 7 installation. IIRC, I chose to install grub to the mbr. I am currently using 9GB out of 15GB that I reserved for F12.

See this for more info:
http://www.mjmwired.net/linux/2009/1...mbr-partition/

guitarguy83 · #3 11th February 2010, 03:25 AM

ok so would 20GB be ample space? or 30?

stoat · #4 11th February 2010, 04:18 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by guitarguy83

ok so would 20GB be ample space? or 30?

Hello guitarguy83,

I think 20 GB is ample space for the system itself. I have been routinely installing Fedora in less space than that, and that includes some of my personal data files in /home. I use other partitions for the bulk of my data storage. Anyway, here's what the Fedora 12 release notes have to say about the matter...

http://docs.fedoraproject.org/releas...e_Requirements

About the partition manager issue, why not use the built-in Disk Management utility for that in Windows 7.

mbratch · #5 11th February 2010, 12:05 PM

I think 20GB is more than enough assuming that you keep any mass storage of gobs of videos or music on another (perhaps shared with Win7) drive. I've been running Fedora for several years and haven't broken the 10GB barrier yet as I have my music and such on a shared drive.

If you want to store a lot of stuff on your Linux partition, then the space you need simply depends upon how much stuff you really want to store.

guitarguy83 · #6 12th February 2010, 12:19 AM

ok so by drive sharing do you mean a drive that can be used by win and fedora? if so how do i go about setting this up? i didnt think win would recognize other partition types? please excuse my ignorance still learning guys thanks!

92b16vx · #7 12th February 2010, 12:34 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by guitarguy83

ok so by drive sharing do you mean a drive that can be used by win and fedora? if so how do i go about setting this up? i didnt think win would recognize other partition types? please excuse my ignorance still learning guys thanks!

You can make it FAT32 or NTFS, WIn and Linux can see both of those. As far as setting it up, either use and external drive, or cut out a partition on your existing drive with Windows built in partition utility.

mbratch · #8 12th February 2010, 02:43 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by 92b16vx

You can make it FAT32 or NTFS, WIn and Linux can see both of those. As far as setting it up, either use and external drive, or cut out a partition on your existing drive with Windows built in partition utility.

That's exactly what I do. I have two Win XP drives, C and D that happen to FAT32. When I'm in Linux I can see both drives using the VFAT drive type. You can also see/use NTFS drives from Linux. You can set up your /etc/fstab to mount the shared drive on boot-up if you always want it online.