Dual boot Vista/openSUSE 10.3

[lewisniven]

ok, never used linux before so i thought id have a go, i know NOTHING bout it so im going in blind, lol.

Im more than competent with vista etc so its all good there, ive done some googling about and it seems to be a ball ache doing a dual boot between vista and linux.

ive got 2 drives in my comp (c:\ and d:\) so is it best to install linux to d:\, as opposed to re-partitioning c:\??

some ppl on the web report loss of Vista from the boot menu, anyone done this??

HELP!!!

 

[TELFORDS_LURK]

I am booting between Vista and Ubuntu, it works perfectly and was pretty staight forward, the Grub bootloader works very well and see's vista perfectly too.

I would install it onto the C: drive along with vista and then use your D: drive as a shared disk. Vista has a built in option where you can shrink a partition so you can make space for Linux. Go to Administrative Tools, Disk Management, Select the Drive, I think its a right click on the required partition and select shrink.

I dont know about SUSE but with Ubuntu all I had to do then was install it into the new partition and it recognised that vista was installed and setup the dual boot menu as part of the setup.

 

[Mells]

Backup your data first!

I'd also do some reading up on paritioning first. From experience, the Open Suse installer will ask you what to do (same in ubuntu)

You can take over the whole drive, take over some of it etc. If you take over x% of it will resize the partition and leave x amount for windows and x amount for linux.

I partitioned my disk like above. Let it resize the disk and partition it for me. It will put an installer on you system so you can choose what you want to boot to.

 

[TELFORDS_LURK]

Just for a little help, I know its not SUSE but the the link below is what I used for Ubuntu, was pretty easy to do and could do it again now without using the instructions.
As said, I know you have mentioned SUSE, but Ubuntu is highly recommended for beginners, being extremely user friendly and has a very established and reliable knowledge base community for help on all sorts of things.

http://apcmag.com/5046/how_to_dual_boot_vista_with_linux_vista_installed_first

 

[lewisniven]

cheers for the replies, at the reccomendation of some ppl at work ive downloaded ubuntu, we'll see how that fares, lol.