mbluesucks

i figured it out. I wasn't giving the boot loader menu enough time. everything works great now. Thanks for all your help.

I got it to install correctly and linux will boot, but it only lets me boot linux all the time or windows all the time. in other words there is no selection screen for me to choose which OS to boot

what is the MBR?

I did all the partitioning and went on through the installation process and it told me to remove the cd and restart my computer. i did that and it will only boot up in windows. is there something else i need to do?

Now i finallt have everything together. can someone point me in the right direction on how to configure everything to make the dual boot possible.

since nothing is on the backup partition i thought that i would just put linux on that and not worry about shrinking the windows partition. I only have like >10 gigs on the windows partition and the backup partition has more room so i figure that is the best place for it. I got a linux book that says that i should put linux on a fat32 system and i would want to save all my open office files and such on the partition that linux is on and just keep linux on D: and Windows on C: and just whenever i need windows boot windows and whenever i need linux boot linux.

ok i got an iso that works and the live cd works. i want to go ahead and install it and i have a partition that dell set up called back up i backed up all that information on a cd and want to format the partition, since it is ntfs and linux needs fat32. windows wont let me format it and i really cant do anything with the live cd to the partitions. is there any good free software out there that will let me partition it? i dont really feel like spending $50 on the acronis suite

how would i do that with windows xp

how do i check it against the md5sums

I have had windows xp on my system since i got it. I want to dual boot and the partions are not the problem. I downloaded the iso image and burned it to a cd and it boots up fine. But right before its loads, i get a error that says: "Kernal panic -not syncing: UFS: unable to mount root fs on unknown -block(8,6)" does anyone know what this means? after that message nothing happens.