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garylouden1
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PostPosted: Sun Nov 27, 2005 3:38 pm    Post subject: beginer need help with dual boot Reply with quote

hi im very new to linux and i would like to set up the current windows xp i have with a dual boot of gentoo

thing is i have no clue what to do, i have looked at web sites but none really make sense, im not a computer noobie im quite good but all this linux stuff is really confusing me..... :?

could someone that knows how to do this please point me in the right direction or better still show me what to do??

thank you :)
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garylouden1
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PostPosted: Sun Nov 27, 2005 3:39 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

and also i have no clue what version to download, i no its not the minimal one but i dont know what one out of the other 2 :? :?
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BoNd60
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PostPosted: Sun Nov 27, 2005 4:04 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Normally, the livecd 2005.1 is what you need (the minimal is for making an online installation (fetch all the sources,...) and the universal contains what you need to install gentoo without a download)
For dual-booting, see this thread https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-406331-highlight-.html and don't be afraid to ask if you don't understand something
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garylouden1
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PostPosted: Sun Nov 27, 2005 4:18 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

i no this is asking alot but could someone that is linux savy maybe write a list of what i have to do?

so far i have windows installed and have like 50gb unused space.

my specs of pc are :

amd 3200 64bit
512mb corsair twinx dual channel
160gig 7200rpm 8mb buffer
dvd rw
cd rw
ATI 9800pro graphics card

what exactly do i have to do now? i downloaded the universal cd( dont worry if this is wrong i got 10meg cable 8) )

im confused about most of the procces :cry:
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BoNd60
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PostPosted: Sun Nov 27, 2005 4:23 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Why don't you use the handbook for installing gentoo (the way to dual boot is described in the thread i posted). It's well explained and quite simple to understand
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cyrillic
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PostPosted: Sun Nov 27, 2005 7:14 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

garylouden1 wrote:
so far i have windows installed and have like 50gb unused space.

If your 50GB of unused space is inside the Windows partition, then you will need to use some software (like Partition Magic) to make the Windows partition smaller. Or you could delete Windows, and reinstall it in a smaller partition.

If your 50GB is unpartitioned space, then you are good to go. Just follow the regular installation instructions, and you will be creating partitions for linux in the free space.
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Fire Hazard
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PostPosted: Mon Nov 28, 2005 7:51 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

You sound like me when I first installed Linux. If you are cheap like me you'll have to face the fact that you are going to partition your hard drive with fdisk. That means you wave bye-bye to your files. So basically you need to backup all the files you want to save to another hard drive, or just burn the files to a DVD or CD. Seeing how you have a DVD rw it should pretty easy to back up all files you want to keep. Once you get that done I would pop in the LiveCD and then type in fdisk /dev/hda and then type in the option d and then 1. This will leave you with a blank hard drive (if you only have one partition. Some computer companies like Dell have multiple partitions.) Next you need to partition your hard drive the way you want too. See http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/2005.1/handbook-amd64.xml?part=1&chap=4 for some help on how you should partition your hard drive for Gentoo Linux. But you also need to make some room for your windows installion. Basically figure out how much space you want to give to XP and make a partition of that size. Be sure to make that partition boot able (in fdisk type in a and then the number that represents your XP partition.) Then once you got that done all you need to do is reinstall XP. Here's a tip to save you alot of trouble. Make your XP partition the first partition. Also, when you install XP make sure you install it on the first partition. If it's factory restore CD like mine you have to go to Advance options and click on the option "Partition C: only." Basicaly this stops XP from partitioning your hard drive into one partition for XP. Basically XP is greedy and will gobble up your hard unless you tell it not too.

Setting up XP for dual booting is by the far the hardest part of installing Gentoo for dual booting. If you need some more help just make a post :)
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sundialsvc4
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PostPosted: Tue Nov 29, 2005 4:30 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

What always made the most sense to me was ... get a second hard-drive! Maybe a third!

Most motherboards have two IDE-chains, which means they can support up to four drives with no additional hardware, but they usually have only two: "the" hard drive and a CD/DVD ROM. Most motherboards can boot the system from any of these devices, as well as (maybe) external devices or the network.

With a second drive, you have the wonderful opportunity of leaving Windows completely alone while you install and use better things .. like Gentoo ;) . The Linux installation lives completely on the alternate drive, and Windows, although it will see that the drive exists, will not recognize its partitions and will ignore them.

A third drive is even handier, because now you have "lots and lots of space." You can experiment with new releases of Linux while preserving the old one unchanged ... and while preserving Windows unchanged, too.

Now, you don't have to repartition anything. It's the way to go, imho...
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Opethian
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PostPosted: Tue Nov 29, 2005 3:02 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

oh! oh! please tell me you can help me with this! this is what i've been trying to do all weekend hehe.
ok, so i've got my pentium4 laptop with 30G, windows installed plus all my work - repartitioning and formatting is not really an option. I just bought a 300G Maxtor IDE external, on which I'm trying to install gentoo. I've followed the handbook to the tee, but it's not working. From what I (and a friend who uses gentoo) can figure out, it's not finding the usb device before it boots. I can't remember the exact error, it's something about the kernel panicking, says it can't find the partition i think. We had a look around and found a 'solution' that involved making a small ram disk that, from what i gathered, told the system to look for and load the usb device before booting anything, but still the same error. We read it's because of a timing error with gentoo and usb drives, that it tries to boot before detecting the devices.
My BIOS boot options are a tad confusing as well: it's got my DVD drive, which is fine, then removable devices - i expected my usb drive to be under this, but it's under hard drives instead. it's a hard drive, yes, but it's through the usb - surely this should count as a removable device?

anyway, please help - from the way you said it it sounds like it's something easy we're overlooking!
Thanks a lot, and I hereby welcome myself to the gentoo forums :P
Opethian



sundialsvc4 wrote:
What always made the most sense to me was ... get a second hard-drive! Maybe a third!

Most motherboards have two IDE-chains, which means they can support up to four drives with no additional hardware, but they usually have only two: "the" hard drive and a CD/DVD ROM. Most motherboards can boot the system from any of these devices, as well as (maybe) external devices or the network.

With a second drive, you have the wonderful opportunity of leaving Windows completely alone while you install and use better things .. like Gentoo ;) . The Linux installation lives completely on the alternate drive, and Windows, although it will see that the drive exists, will not recognize its partitions and will ignore them.

A third drive is even handier, because now you have "lots and lots of space." You can experiment with new releases of Linux while preserving the old one unchanged ... and while preserving Windows unchanged, too.

Now, you don't have to repartition anything. It's the way to go, imho...

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jballou
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PostPosted: Tue Nov 29, 2005 6:22 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Opethian wrote:
oh! oh! please tell me you can help me with this! this is what i've been trying to do all weekend hehe.
ok, so i've got my pentium4 laptop with 30G, windows installed plus all my work - repartitioning and formatting is not really an option. I just bought a 300G Maxtor IDE external, on which I'm trying to install gentoo. I've followed the handbook to the tee, but it's not working. From what I (and a friend who uses gentoo) can figure out, it's not finding the usb device before it boots. I can't remember the exact error, it's something about the kernel panicking, says it can't find the partition i think. We had a look around and found a 'solution' that involved making a small ram disk that, from what i gathered, told the system to look for and load the usb device before booting anything, but still the same error. We read it's because of a timing error with gentoo and usb drives, that it tries to boot before detecting the devices.
My BIOS boot options are a tad confusing as well: it's got my DVD drive, which is fine, then removable devices - i expected my usb drive to be under this, but it's under hard drives instead. it's a hard drive, yes, but it's through the usb - surely this should count as a removable device?

Sounds like you checked the BIOS which was what I was going to reccomend. That done, check to make sure that the USB IDE controller on that drive can do a boot. I had an older USB HDD enclosure that lacked the facility to boot (something about the controller). I actually had a Jumpdrive that I formatted ext2 and made my boot part, then ran my removable HDD as the main file system. Worked like a charm. That aside, can I get the following info (you may need to boot from livecd):
1. Output of cfdisk - what partitions are active, what does Linux call the drive, and what ones are labeled Bootable?
2. mount the boot partition (if you have one) and type cat /boot/grub/device.map and tell me what it says
3. Lets see the grub.conf for the USB HDD

That should help make the diagnosis a little easier.
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Opethian
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PostPosted: Thu Dec 01, 2005 4:43 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

hi, sorry for late reply, hope you guys can still help! still trying to boot gentoo from a usb HDD. this is what cfdisk says:
sda1 - non-bootable, primary, NTFS, label [^_], 272816M (that's my windows partition on the hdd, need to change it to fat so i can write to it from linux)
sda2 - bootable, primary, ext3, no label, 41.13 (boot partition obv.)
sda3 - non-bootable, primary, Linux swap/Solaris, no label, 518M (swap)
sda4 - non-bootable, primary, ext3, no label, 26707M (root)

cat /boot/grub/device.map outputs:
(hd0) /dev/hda
(hd1) /dev/sda

and my grub.conf:
default 0
timeout 30

title=Gentoo
root (hd0,1)
kernel (hd0,1)/gentoo_kernel-2.6.12-r6 root=/dev/sda4
initrd (hd0,1)/usb.img

(i think that last one was to do with the ram disk we tried, but i'm not 100% sure)

title=Windows
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
makeactive
chainloader +1

and that's it. i really hope i'm just being stupid and it's not an impossibly complicated matter :)
thanks for your help guys
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Opethian
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PostPosted: Fri Dec 02, 2005 8:52 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

shameless but hopefully helpful bump
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