Red Hat 9.0 and Win XP Dual System Installation Guide

Today, Linux has not only made great progress in the application of the server field, but also more and more people choose to use it in the field of desktop applications. Let's take Red Hat Linux 9.0 as an example to introduce how to form a dual system with Windows XP.

Divide the domain of Linux

Since Linux cannot be installed on the Windows partition, you must split a piece of territory in the hard disk for Linux use. It is recommended to use the partition magician for lossless partitioning. For convenience, here is an example to illustrate: a Windows XP computer has a 30GB hard drive, divided into three areas (C, D, and E), of which E6 has 16.6GB (about 7GB) Available space). Our goal is to strip out 7GB of free space for Red Hat.

1. First start the partition magic in Windows XP, you can see the details of the disk partition from the main window. Click on the partition E in the detail pane on the right to select it.

2. Click the “Adjust the capacity of a partition” command in the task list on the left to pop up a “Adjust Capacity/Moving Partition” dialog box.

3. At the top of the dialog is a bar graph showing the use of partition E, where the black bar on the left indicates the used space and the green bar on the right indicates the available space. You can use the mouse to directly drag the green bar to adjust the E disk capacity. Obviously, the minimum capacity of the E disk is the capacity of the used space (the small data will destroy the original data), and the reduced capacity becomes its own space.

4. Click the "OK" button to return to the main interface, at this point we can see the newly divided 7GB free space. The next steps are very important. Although this 7GB disk space is already "free body", it still belongs to the extended partition of Windows, so you need to divide this 7GB free space from the Windows extension partition.

5. Click on the extended partition to select it, as shown in Figure 1. In a similar way, this 7GB free space is divided from the Windows extended DOS partition. Now we have cut a 7GB free space from the Windows XP domain for Linux.

Figure 1 Divide free space from the extended partition

Note, be sure to divide the free space from the Windows extended partition, because Linux partition format and Windows are not complete compatible. If the disk space used by Red Hat belongs to the Windows extended partition, it will lead to "unacceptable". Many friends reflected that after installing Red Hat, they found that Windows became slow and blamed on Red Hat. In fact, the root cause was that the partition was not stripped of free space from the extended partition.

There are several ways to implement dual booting of Windows and Linux:

◆ For users with dual hard disks, Linux can be installed on the second hard disk (Windows is naturally installed on the first one) On the hard disk), and make sure that GRUB (LILO) is installed in the main boot sector of the second hard disk, and then specify which hard disk to boot from in the BIOS each time it is booted.

◆ The most common method is to automatically take over the boot menu of the dual system with the Linux boot load manager GRUB (LILO).

◆ You can use Windows XP's NT bootloader ntldr, boot.ini to achieve dual boot. The advantage of this method is that it is convenient to delete Linux in the future, and it is in line with our usage habits; the disadvantage is that the implementation is relatively complicated, and it is necessary to obtain the boot image file of the Linux system.

◆ You can choose not to install the Linux boot load manager (or not install it in the main boot sector), but remember to create a Linux boot disk during the installation process. Use this boot disk to boot the system into Linux in the future.

Here are four implementations of the dual system. This article will introduce the second and third methods that are common.