Installing RH 9 as dual boot on one drive

[Bagels]

First off, a big hello to everyone (this being my first post here and all)! Now down to business - I'm interested in setting up Red Hat 9 on my laptop, which is currently running Win XP Home. Here's the specs:

Core hardware stuff:
AMD Athlon XP 1600+ 1.4GHz processor
256MB SDRAM
ATI Rage Mobility M1 8MB video card
Via AC'97 Audio
Realtek RTL8139 Ethernet NIC (10/100mbit/sec ethernet card)

Drives:
IDE based Hitachi DK23DA-20 hard drive, 20GB, divided into these partitions:

10GB - C: - NTFS formatted, contains windows
8.62GB - D: - NTFS formatted, contains nothing

Mat****a UJDA730 DVD/CDRW combo drive
Generic floppy disk drive


Now, here's my question. Is it possible to install Red Hat 9 on the second of the two partitions (the unused 8.62GB one) and still keep Win XP intact? I know that the primary difficulty here lies in the bootloader, which needs to be in a certain spot on the hard drive that is already used by the first NTFS partition. If anyone here knows how to work around this, please tell! I've already got a bit of Linux experience under my belt (I installed Mandrake 9.0 on an older machine, even went through the rigmarole of getting its ISA soundcard to work with sndconfig), so I can handle somewhat technical instructions, if need be.

[serz]

Sure you can, formatting your unused partition to ext3 for example.. and installin any distro you want, install Grub and configure it.

[Bagels]

After selecting the second partition to be reformatted as ext3, and for it to have the mount point /, Disk Druid warns me that the partition may not meet booting constraints for my architecture, and says that the creation of a boot disk is strongly advised. Presumably it means a floppy disk to use for booting? If so, that's acceptable (just so long as I can find a non-cruddy floppy disk to use).

[KoalaBear33]

I'm a newbie but I'm going to be doing a similar thing as you so I have read a lot of the relevant docs (in my case, I'm going to install Red Hat on a system with win98+windows 2000; but my drives are FAT (not NTFS) so I don't have your problem). I am not 100% certain but I think you need a boot disk if your windows is on an NTFS partition (if it is on FAT-type partition, you can simply use the LILO bootloader).

You can get more info from the documentation:

http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/linux/RHL-9-Manual/install-guide/ch-x86-dualboot.html

KoalaBear33

[Bagels]

Got it working late last night - both the bootloader and WinXP still work, too. Aparrently the booting constraints that I was worried about (boot partition has to be in the first 1024 cylinders) don't always apply to newer computers.

[legelf]

On every install I've done with Mandrake 9.0, which uses lilo instead of grub, I've loaded the bootloader into the mbr. The one thing every install has in common is that windows is the first OS to be installed. I've never had a problem with the bootloader. Linux seems to be more 'hardware aware' for lack of a better term, than windows.