Dual Boot with Win2k and RH7.1: what's the best method?

[Silent Bob]

I have decided to bite the bullet and install Linux on our system at home. We already have win2k installed on it and I will have to have win2k on the machine as well as Linux for the other members of my family.

I will have to format the HD and install everything from scratch. I know that I have to install win2k before Linux.
I have a 20GB HD, of which win2k will have at least 12GB. I take it that this will put my Linux partitions beyond the 1024th cylinder.

What is the best method to dual boot the two OS's. Should I use the NT boot-loader or LILO? or does it make any real difference?

If I use LILO should I install it to the MBR or are there nasty repercussions from doing this?

thanks

[Timbo]

There is really no danger in installing Lilo to the MBR, you can still boot both OSes with "boot disks" which hopefully you have created. If you do plan to go with lilo I would suggest making a very small partition before the 1024 cylinder (a couple of megs is enough) and mapping it to /boot when you install Linux, that should avoid that limitation. I have no experience with NT boot loader so I can't say which is better. If you really don't want to deal with trying to get your MBR to the original (not all that hard) try experimenting with a floppy disk first.

[bdg1983]

RH7.1 should have the version of Lilo that supports booting past the 1024 cylinder, so you should be safe.

Reinstalling W2K to NTFS? If you do and since the newer NTFS5 will probably not be accessable from Redhat, then why not do this.

8GB NTFS for W2K (Primary)
8GB ext2 for Redhat (Primary)
128MB or so swap partition (logical)
4GB Fat32 partition (logical) so you can share files between W2K and Linux. audio, video, documents, downloads, backups etc.

[Silent Bob]

Thanks for the advice guys :)

mdwatts that's a very good suggestion, wouldn't have thought of it myself

[bdg1983]

No problem. I always create multiple partitions for everything. Win apps,data,games all shared between ME, W2K and Linux.

All apps for ME and W2K are installed in the winapps fat32 partition as

Program Files ME
Program Files W2K

etc.

[melloman]

I'm a firm believer in system commander 2k.
It usually gives all the OS's what they want.
and it gives partition copying, resizing, and moving options, as well as NTFS to FAT conversions.