Dual booting (Debian and win 2K)

[particleman]

I have just got an HP laptop and I am wanting to run both win 2K Pro and Debian. I already have win 2K up and running.

I have a 40gb drive and only one partition right now. But I can easily change that with partition magic should I need to.

I been reading a few articles here and there on how to get a dual boot system up and running but I figure that I ask here since most of those articles refer to mandrake and windows 2K or XP.

So are there any good step-by-step tutorials that anyone know of? I have installed debian before (no dual booting) using LILO but I have read in few places that LILO tends to cause problems with the windows boot records so it is better to use GRUB. However I haven't used grub before. In any case if you can point me in the right direction to any tutorials on how install Linux on an already existing windows installation I'd really appreciatte it. Thanx!

~pman

[sharth]

if you use the sarge installer it should auto-detect windows and add it to the boot loader for you.

[XiaoKJ]

And for a personal system do not use the stable one cos its for servers. sarge is the current unstable one but always stable enough for normal use.

[mrBen]

Originally posted by XiaoKJ
And for a personal system do not use the stable one cos its for servers. sarge is the current unstable one but always stable enough for normal use.

Strictly speak, Sarge is the 'testing' version, and Sid is the 'unstable' (although you are right, neither of them are particularly unstable).

[particleman]

Hi guys, first of thanx for the responses!
When you say for me to use the sarge installer does that mean to make the boot floppies for sarge, in other words use the LILO for sarge, and just go about the installation as I normally would on an empty system? does this mean that since I only have one partition right now (a C-drive) that sarge would allow me to make the new partition for Debian without a problem? by the way is sarge = testing or unstable).

Also if I did wanted to use the stable version of Debian can I still use the sarge loader? thanx!

~pman

[sharth]

I'll explain a bit (with some history).

Okay. So we got our debian. Lots of people like debian. Many people hate debian's installer. so... The debian people decide to create a new one that has some auto-detection stuff in there, as well as other features to make it a bit easier to use. The last version of debian to use the old installer (the one everyone hates) is the current stable version of debian. Sarge (testing, which will eventually become stable... eventually) has a new installer being created with it. This installer tries to do things for you (simple stuff that can be annoying, like which module for your sound card) including trying to determine what other operating systems are installed, and creating a boot menu (based on grub, there may be a lilo option, i don't remember. I know grub exists) for all of the installed operating systems, including windows, other linuxes, *bsd, etc.

http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer

Now, the current release is beta4 (the installer won't be released until sarge is), and there are a few problems with it. One of these is that sometimes it may fail to detect windows (the joy of bugs). However, it does mention that this is fixed in the daily builds. So. I would recommend that you either try the normal release (beta4, which could possibly work fine for you), or that you try one of the daily releases, which has the problem of detecting the other operating systems fixed.

2004-07-04 Daily Image (http://cdimage.debian.org/pub/cdimage-testing/daily/i386/20040704/sarge-i386-netinst.iso)
Beta4 (http://cdimage.debian.org/pub/cdimage-testing/daily/i386/beta4/sarge-i386-netinst.iso)

[sharth]

Originally posted by particleman
Also if I did wanted to use the stable version of Debian can I still use the sarge loader? thanx! I don't believe so.