dual boot MDV 2008.1 / Vista Home Basic

[Trio3b]

Reasonably familiar with dual boots but never done it on a lappy (Compaq CQ50 139WM) with Vista (home basic) and with a recovery partition. Also new to 2008.1 ( 10.2 user for the past 3 yrs)

 

I'm tempted to just wipe Vista (already annoyed by the nagware/ legal threats /crippleware/trial versions etc.) and install MDV like I have on all my other PCs, but this laptop is for daughter who might want the webcam or some other junk ......hence the dual boot.

 

Laptop is brand new and has not even been used (configured) yet, but I will make some restore disks for her.

I believe I can use Vista disk mngmnt to resize the large partition ( rather than use mdv installer), but have never done this with a recovery partition involved and want to make sure I don't have to use the recovery disks.

 

Am assuming that the recovery part is at the end of the disk (will run fdisk -l) and won't be affected when I install GRUB to MBR and also assuming that MDV installer still recognizes the NTFS partitions and adds them to menu.lst. Is this correct?

 

Also is it still necessary to create a FAT partition for common access by both OS's to files?

 

Any advice welcome.

Thanks

[medo3891]

The recovery partition is at the beginning of the HD. You don't want to touch it, that doesn't play nice with the warranty stuff. Besides the recovery partition isn't this big anyway so just leave it alone. Instead resize the vista partition. Here's an excellent post made by a Mandriva user about how best to resize a windows partition: http://forum.mandriva.com/viewtopic.php?p=569269#569269 it also talks about creating the necessary partitions for Mandriva during installation. If you want to use vista to resize the partition then run the disk defragmenter and the scan disk tools at least. In the link I posted above go with the first partition set up (just three partitions /, /home and swap).

 

When Mandriva installs the boot loader, GRUB, it usually detects there's a bootable windows partition and will add it to the boot options. In your case since there's a recovery partition which is also bootable, you might find two windows entries on the boot loader list, vista will be the second windows entry. If windows is not added it can be added easily after you install Mandriva.

 

When prompted where you want to install the boot loader, install it to the MBR of the HD.

 

You don't need to create a fat partition to share files between Mandriva and windows, Mandriva now supports reading/writing to NTFS file system out-of-the-box (2008.1 and 2009.0. if you want to 2008.0 you will need to install the ntfs-3g package).

 

BTW, I think Mandriva supports a wide variety of web cams now (out of the box in 2009.0 and doable in 2008.1).

 

Hope everything goes fine.