Dual Boot - Redhat & Vista

Stellios · 2 Oct 2007 at 10:43

How do you go about this? Im using Redhat at uni for networking and other modules, so could do with a dual boot on the laptop/PC, but hwo do you go about doing it? Ive heard Vista overwrites any other OS's that are on the computer?

Cheers

AndrewP · 2 Oct 2007 at 11:56

Best bet would be to install Vista first but leave some unpartitioned space to put Linux on, then install Linux afterwards, there should be a screen in the setup process for choosing which OS to boot by default, how long of a delay and so on.

If you're after something to replicate your university setup then either CentOS (Red Hat Enterprise Linux without the branding and cost) or Fedora (more of a desktop distribution) would be fine.

gumbald · 2 Oct 2007 at 12:27

They might not recognise Vista when installing Grub, but you can go ahead and then edit the Grub menu manually, using grubed

AndrewP · 2 Oct 2007 at 14:30

Fedora 7's GRUB detected Vista when I installed them both on a machine a couple of weeks ago, and you can edit the boot settings in the installer as described here: http://docs.fedoraproject.org/install-guide/f7/en_US/ch-bootloader.html, should be similar for CentOS as they use roughly the same installer.

GarethDW · 2 Oct 2007 at 16:18

If you've got the choice then it's easier to install Windows followed by Linux, but even if Linux is already installed and you drop Windows over the top of it, you can still get Linux back even after the Windows boot loader has aimlessly destroyed your Linux one without thinking to check for other operating systems installed on the PC.

Rich43 · 13 Oct 2007 at 20:40

You will need to resize your ntfs partition if you have one to make space for linux then install your redhat in the free space. I have ubuntu and it detects vista and adds to menu..

put in vista first, linux second.