dual boot in linux

I have 40 GB Harddisk. Laptop. Mountains of Software... XP Professional and Red Hat 8
Dual Boot, Before Red Hat went "Enterprise".
I have about 27 GB Windows. 7 GB Linux.
Installing the first time was not easy.

Hey Deepa,

on linux..
- fdisk /dev/hda
- press 'p' and paste result here

and on windows ... right click on 'my computer' click on 'manage' .. on left panel click on 'disk management' .. .. write down result on right panel

Regards,
Peeyush
http://www.peeyush.tk/
http://geocities.com/peeyush_maurya/

You can create partition using Disk Druide (similar to fdisk). Note: Swap partition needs to be double that of RAM for smooth operation.

Use Partition Magic in windows to create linux partition and swap partition,is easy.

you may have 2 ways to avoid the problem :
1. Delete your existing linux partition and then create 3 partitions from remained 6 Gb, one of them will be swap partition before installing linux.
2. You may run your linux without swap partition but with swap file by doing the following steps :
a. Making file named swap in your windows partition of yoursize by performing this command:
as root : dd if=/dev/zero of=/mount_point_of_windows_partition/swap bs=1M count=yoursize ( For example yoursize is 128)
b. Making swap file system for swap by :
mkswap /mount_point_of_windows_partition/swap
now you need to add line : swapon /mount_point_of_windows_partition/swap in your startup script and this will probably solve your problem

deepa,
u can add a swap file instead of swap partition which can b usedd on the root partition on anywhere on the disk where u can create this one. i m writing the steps 2 create the swap file in technical way:-

1.

Determine the size of the new swap file and multiple by 1024 to determine the block size. For example, the block size of a 64 MB swap file is 65536.
2.

At a shell prompt as root, type the following command with count being equal to the desired block size:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/swapfile bs=1024 count=65536

3.

Setup the swap file with the command:

mkswap /swapfile

4.

To enable the swap file immediately but not automatically at boot time:

swapon /swapfile

5.

To enable it at boot time, edit /etc/fstab to include:

/swapfile swap swap defaults 0 0

The next time the system boots, it will enable the new swap file.
6.

After adding the new swap file and enabling it, make sure it is enabled by viewing the output of the command cat /proc/swaps or free.

deepa,
u can add a swap file instead of swap partition which can b usedd on the root partition on anywhere on the disk where u can create this one. i m writing the steps 2 create the swap file in technical way:-

1.

Determine the size of the new swap file and multiple by 1024 to determine the block size. For example, the block size of a 64 MB swap file is 65536.
2.

At a shell prompt as root, type the following command with count being equal to the desired block size:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/swapfile bs=1024 count=65536

3.

Setup the swap file with the command:

mkswap /swapfile

4.

To enable the swap file immediately but not automatically at boot time:

swapon /swapfile

5.

To enable it at boot time, edit /etc/fstab to include:

/swapfile swap swap defaults 0 0

The next time the system boots, it will enable the new swap file.
6.

After adding the new swap file and enabling it, make sure it is enabled by viewing the output of the command cat /proc/swaps or free.

suppose if u want 2 create 512MB file in home folder then follow this one:-

dd if=/dev/zero of=/home/swapfile bs=1k count=512k
This creates a blank file called /home/swapfile which is 512 MB in size
# mkswap -f /home/swapfile
This creates a swap filesystem in the area occupied by /home/swapfile
# swapon /home/swapfile
This enables the space occupied by /home/swapfile to be used as a swap area.

Edit /etc/fstab and put an entry there so that this file will be mounted as swap on startup. man 5 fstab and man swapon for more info.