dual boot on vista/

[Patient zer0]

anyone run a dual boot on their vista machine?

i want to put a dual boot on here with a linux distro but not sure how vitsa will take it. i have a leeched version of norton partition magic that i will use but have never done a partition before.

i have an older machine here with ubuntu on it, but the processor is slow and the video card is crap. this machine im on now is dual processor with a nvidia 564mb video card, i'd like to use the linux graphics on his one but need windows for school work and i guess you always need to have a windows machine around.

[zentraed]

Instead of dual-booting, I set up a virtual machine. I needed Red Hat to run a scientific visualization app when I was in grad school, so I just setup VMWare on my laptop and setup a RH image. With a dual-core, you have plenty of power to run both simultaneously. If it's a desktop system, you can even dedicate a NIC to the VM so it has it's own unique IP on your LAN.

[SatCam]

When you install Ubuntu, it has software for partitioning and software for dual-booting (grub). All it does is take out window's booter, which only really allows dual booting of two windows installs, and puts in grub, which can boot many different operating systems

[SatCam]

BTW, you may run into a problem with partitioning if you partitioned the entire disk for vista

[DolaMight]

It's easier if you have Vista installed first. Vista uses a new boot manager that tries to lauch before anything else so you'll have to configure any other OS boots within Vista's boot manager program.

Even then you may have trouble getting another OS to boot. To be safe if you have 2 physical hard drives install an OS on each, then you can just hit F8 during POST to boot to a specific hard drive.

If you're still having issues look up Acronis Boot Manager, if you can find it, install it, it will give you a GUI bootup screen where you can boot to as many OS's or devices you wish. The whole Acronis suite is great for backups, making ghost images, and easy repartitioning of your hard drives without losing data or reformatting. I prefer it to Partition Magic.

For an emulator VMWare works incredibly well, performance wise, you can barely tell it's running within another OS. If you need Linux just to play with or for just one program it's a good idea. I think they offer a free version for personal use.

[cupcakelove]

I haven't done dual booting on a Windows machine in a while, but the rule used to be install Windows first, since their boot manager refuses to recognize anything besides Microsoft OS's as legit.

[Cleophus James]

Dual Boot for a vista machine here at work was no fun to do. I had to get a lot of utilities to help.

[plug]

Go to VMWARE's site. download the free version and signup for the password. The toolset is easy to work with. Make sure that your system meets VMWARE's hardware requiremets.
After the installation, I would recommend installing the desired OS on a drive other than your primary drive.

Set the Virtual NIC to a unique IP address such as: 192.168.1.xx and input same subnet as your router dictates.

When setting memory options for the Virtualized OS, use about 1/2 the RAM your system has. I would suggest prior to using VMWARE, see if maxing the RAM of your system is an option for you. Vista and AERO coupled with the various display readability enhancement options and Sidebar really consume system resouces irrespective of the claim from MS of better efficient mem management in the OS. I would also suggest applying SP1 to the system prior to VMWare installation. You would see better performance in the long run.

There are other options as far as virtualization software is concernd but I do not like Microsoft's virtual offering.

If virtualization is not your thing or too confusing, feel confident that during the Linux install, your partitans created could be defined in the setup routine of the desired OS. Vista's Boot manager would most likely see the other OS and present a boot menu upon system startup.

I do not think that Partitian Magic is required unless you want more control of secondary or additional drives, etc.

Hope this helps anyone.