Switching a win2k to dual-boot gentoo

rlyacht · Apprentice Joined: 17 Apr 2002 Posts: 170

I have a win2k box that I'd like to re-do as dual boot, booting win2k and linux (gentoo BTW). I realize this is really a generic question, so I hope people don't mind my asking it here.

I want to save myself the trouble of re-installing win2k, and I'd like to get some comments on whether my approach will work, whether there's a better way, etc.

1. Use Partition Magic (tm) to shrink my (single) parition. Create a new 100M parition that will be my linux /boot.

2. Boot off my gentoo install CD. Use fdisk to mark hda2 (my /boot) as bootable and be sure that /hda1 is not marked as bootable.

3. Install gentoo like so

squanto · Posted: Thu May 09, 2002 3:40 am Post subject:

Yep, that should work, just give your / partition atleast 3 gigs or so, and boot only has to be 30 megs, not the recommended 100. You should just shrink your win2k partition by about 4 gigs, and don't create any partitions, let fdisk do it for you. Just so you get compatibility, but making the partitions in partition magic shouldn't hurt you, just make sure to do mke2fs for ext2, add the -j to make ext3 once you boot into the gentoo install.
I have win2k on my first partition and gentoo on the rest on my T22 laptop, so it is doable, just remember the rootnoverify and chainloader +1.

-Andrew