Dual Boot Windows and Linux

The dream of every Newbie is Dual Boot machine :) We all know that it is not easy to completely migrate from Closed Source software to an Open Source one. You will need at least a couple of months and a lot of free time to do so. That's why most of the people do a Dual Boot machine. What is Dual Boot? This is a simple configuration and making Windows and Linux work on one machine without bothering each other. You may have read somewhere that setting up a Dual Boot is not easy at all and in some cases imposible, well that's not true. It is true that is not like installing Closed Source OS on your machine ( Clicking only NEXT :) ) but it is not that hard. Follow the guide and www.LinNewbies.com® team guarantee you that you will have a Dual Boot machine in a short amount of time.

To do this you will need to have a Windows installed first,(The Following example is made on a fresh copy and Acer Aspire Series) after that boot up Windows and Let's get this party started.
Go to the "START" menu and write down "computer management". After that click on the Computer Management......

Open Computer Management and click on Disk Management, after that right click on your hard drive and select Shrink Volume:

After that select the size that you want your Linux partition to be and click Shrink.

After you shrink you volume your hard drive should look like that :

Now you have a couple of choices, depending on the Linux Distribution that you are going to use (all of them have fdisk). The first and easiest way is to use a graphical installer to do that for you. Our example is going to be with Sabayon Linux 4.0 and Anaconda Installer. The second way which I can consider for a little advanced users will be with fdisk.

Download the *.iso of the choosen Distribution, burn it to a cd with Nero Burning Rom or similar and restart your PC.

Now when you boot up the LiveCD start the installer and answer all the borring questions about the Location and Language. When you get to the hard drive part, select manually partition:

After that select the Free (Unpartitioned) Space and click "NEW". Select the /boot partition. This size of 100MB is plenty:

Swap is next. The swap partition should be 2xRAM. The current PC has 3GB of RAM Memory but 1000MB is fine:

The root partition is last. It is ok if you put it to all the available space:

Click Next when you are done with the partitioning and you will see the Bootloader configuration. As you can see the Windows options for boot is available, so start the installation and Enjoy your new Dual Boot Machine.

The second options is for more "advanced" users. It includes using fdisk from konzole or terminal. In order to provide a good Screenshots we will Boot up System RescueCD and ssh to the machine. SysRescCD is a Gentoo Based LiveCD designed for Rescuing dead systems. It is our favourite. You can download it from the official Website.So, download the *.iso, burn it and boot it up. After booting up the Network interfaces are down by default.

We are going to cover manual repartitioning on Acer Aspire Series (The model does not matter).
Ok so you have booted SysRescCd and let's get the party started. Fire up fdisk. Usually the HDD is under /dev/sda.Check if your Windows partition is under /dev/sda1. So type fdisk /dev/sda to go in Fdisk, and then n for a new partition. You need a primary partition(p and after that select the partition number. In our case is number 2 (the boot partition), When asked for the first cilynder just hit enter, after that point the size of it +100MB

Now is time for the swap partition. While still in fdisk press n for new partition,p for primary partition and number (in that case 3), hit enter and select the size. The swap partition is good to the the RAMx2 but +1000MB is fine:

Now is time for the root / partition. Select n for a new partition, p for a primary and just hit enter a couple of times for making the root partition the rest of your Hard Drive:

Now we need to make the second partition swap. Hit t the number for swap is 82:

Now is time to save all changes. Type w to save all chenges to your hard drive.

And you are all set. You have a Windows and Linux partitions. Now depending on your distribution you have to install kernel and file system. It is very important to configure Boot Loader correct. We always use Grub. The article for configuring GRUB is coming soon.