Linux and 7. How to have both?

Here is screenshot guide i made it might not be as good but its my first i hope it helps i will include how to manually create partitions in few minutes. I hope it helps
Here

the process starts with ss1 and ends with ss30 photobucket did scatter them around and not in order so be careful

@leaky: I'm going to cry UNCLE and abort here. A wise man once said, "My cup runneth over" - - mine just did and it's a mess. Good luck

I had no idea how complicated (to me) this all would be. I may have fiddled a bit here and there with hardware and with html and css, but I don't have the time or inclination to learn what is needed for Linux, so maybe I will nix the idea of dual OS on that laptop. Thank you all for your suggestions.

Glad we got that out of the way early in the thread... :rolleyes:

I will have my son read this thread and see whether he wants to pursue this dual environment. Reading all of your comments I now realize that for me, the dual OS looks like double the trouble of just one OS and I already have issues with the one. But if son is willing to give it a go, well maybe. And he has used linux a bit and likes it.

I do appreciate all the feedback, the banter between you all makes me see that I either must jump in the deep water, or just stick a toe in. Posting these questions is like the toe thing, and I see there are big fish biting....

Great Idea Leeky. Will do.

Firstly i want to apologize for the state of the guide i was on a hurry when i made it didnt get much time to organize it and the photobucket came in and screwed the order of the pictures.
Due to the post limitation regarding images and links i couldnt post the pictures here so please dont hold that against me
The 3rd partition is for data sharing between both systems ofc i could just make one partition for windows and linux would still read data off of it but if this partition gets crowded it will effect windows performance as windows needs alot of free space on the system partition to operate correctly.
Its also not small as i said its for demonstration only (a partition for windows 50GB+ and 20-25Gb for linux i know its too much but better safe than sorry and the rest for a data sharing partition. if u have larger/smaller HDD u can modify the given layout to fit ur HDD.
Also ubuntu's install process isnt that much different from fedora's and most linux distro's so it should be fine

I don't run windows, so my interest in dual boot is minimal...

There is some use in Night Fire's idea if a "storage partition" however. In fact I have always had a FAT32 storage partition and still do:

Code:

$ df -hTl
Filesystem     Type   Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/root      ext4   9.2G  1.2G  7.6G  14% /
/dev/sda5      ext4    28G   12G   15G  46% /usr
/dev/sda6      ext4    26G   14G   11G  56% /home
/dev/sda3      vfat   9.8G  8.8G  988M  91% /fat32
tmpfs          tmpfs 1004M     0 1004M   0% /dev/shm

(it's an 80GB PATA disk - I do have a SATA 2 controller on this board but no SATA disk drive yet...)

As you can see I always mount separate /usr and /home partitions. I do this so that between installs/reinstalls of different distros (happens rarely these days) I can preserve my files untouched and any other stuff I have in /usr/local/ . Ideally that stuff should go in /opt and if/when I next reinstall that's probably how I will do it.

My /fat32 is a relic of the dual boot days. I used it as a convenient means for dumping files that I wanted to access in Windows. Nowadays it's simply redundant and I've been meaning to get rid of it for quite a while but have never quite gotten around to it.

EXCELLENT system management As a developer, not only do I isolate /Home, but have a /Dev partition for building software.

{failure to plan is defacto planning to fail }

Strange that you mount /dev on a separate partition. Isn't that pretty much pointless nowadays as in most modern systems udev populates that directory at boot time and there would be nothing worth preserving there between different installs anyway...?

oops; /SDEV, aka Software Development. /dev is for devices grrrrr.

I see. I don't do any coding, but I keep my /build directory under /home/myuser as it's more convenient, I don't need to set any permissions or use root permissions and as I said previously /home is on a separate partition.

thats the beauty about linux you can do whatever you want with it and it'd still perform 100% making your install and distro up to the entire system as personalized as it could get.
The only problem that would make someone dual boot/OS is that some of windows software cant be ran on linux and doesnt have a decent alternative on linux which are needed by most people who are emigrating from windows to linux also all modern games "which what im keeping windows for ".

It's not really that hard to do. Just download a copy of Gparted(it's free).
Burn it to a disc. Insert the disc. Reboot the computer and Format a free portion(Unused) of your HD to an NTFS partition. Then remove your Gparted disc and insert the Windows Seven Installation Disc and Windows will install in the newly formated partition. There is no danger at this point of losing your linux partition because your Windows OS Does not recognize that part of the Hard Drive. You will want to download and burn a copy of GRUB(it's free) as the new Windows OS tend to mess up the boot sequence and GRUB will restore it.

The two things you have to careful about is in formating the Hard Drive you DO NOT
format the part of the drive that holds your Linux System and that you format an NTFS partition large enough to hold the Windows OS.