Dual Booting

Well the time came for me to add a full Linux distro to my new notebook after using Knoppix while I got the windows side of the machine ready to work with. As luck would have it around the time I was ready a new release from Mandrake came available and off I went to install it (courtesy of Linux Journal).

Having read about dual booting for sometime and having a windows system in the past that had a similar setup I decided this would be relatively easy. Mandrake 9.2 and above offered a feature to partition your windows drive for a ntfs system and no matter what I tried I could not get it to work. I ended up purchasing a new copy of partition magic. After installing this to do my partition set-up it kept bombing out. The long story is that if you are planning to run a dual boot set-up, first run a chkdsk on the harddrive before attempting to partition. After I performed the chkdsk /f trick the Linux installion went pretty easy.

Well now I have the best of both worlds as I continue learning about Linux/UNIX, though my most important tools are not written for this platform yet it is nice to see some of the features available in other operating systems.