REDHAT Linux/NT Dual Boot Support

Dual Boot Machine: The ability to have two operating systems installed on one machine and the ability to run either of them at system start-up with one being the default. The only Dual Boot combination supported at Fermi is Linux and NT.

The first thing that needs to be decided is if you want to Dual Boot.

Dual Boot Considerations

Disk Space
- You need suffcient disk space for both NT and Linux. Linux needs at a minimum of 700 mb. NT needs 1000mb minimum.
Boot Manager
- LILO
  - Easy to install
  - Works well with Linux and NT
  - Supported by CD
- System Commander or Partition Magic
  - Each of these work but you are on your own in configuring them since we don't provide support for them.
  - Select First sector of partition when asked where to put LILO. Otherwise you wipe out the System Commander/Parition Magic boot sector. After that you will have to figure out the rest yourself.
Data transfer between Linux and NT
- A suggestion is to make a "dos" partition as a transfer partition. The issue here is that NT cannot read a Linux partition and Linux cannot read a NT partition (not really, there is a beta driver available but it has not been fully tested)
Limitations
- Since you can only be booted in one OS at a time then of course the other is not available. Thus it can not be expected that either is available at any single moment in time. For instance a Dual Boot system could not be used as a e-mail destination since at any time either OS could be up and the email would go to what ever OS is up..

We suggest you use Linux's boot manager LILO.

If you decide to Dual Boot with NT and you are having the PCS group install NT please request that they leave at least 1125 mb that is not used for NT. This can be either in disk space that is not allocated to any partition or in a non NT partiition that Linux can use..

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