Re: dual-OS system

[RRPotratz]

David Baron wrote:
On Thursday 18 November 2004 11:20, 
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 

As mentioned in my previous mail, I'll run a dual-OS system. Since l have
only one drive, I'll divide it into two partitions, one for Win XP and one
for Debian. I think this is a good way to start off. When one fails, I can
use the other to troubelshoot via the Web. I forsee doing this a lot in the
initial stage. 
   

As another poster has said, you need a swap partition as well, 1-2x RAM.
 

Question
1. How easy is it to switch from one OS to another? Is rebooting the only
way?
   

You set up lilo or grub and boot to one or the other. If you use paritionmagic 
(costs), they have a bootmagic utility to handle this as well.

You might look into "colinux". Whether it will run off your linux installation 
I do not know. It can boot knoppix and run it in a window.

 

2. Linux uses ext2 or ext3 filesystem, XP uses NTFS. Can files be swap 
between the two? More likely I wouldl be copying Linux file to XP, e.g. log
files required for troubleshooting
   

There are, as posted, other alternatives as well. Ext3 is simplest, I think.
Linux can mount NTFS read-only but has full FAT32 support.
I will send you on private cover, a little ext2 file explorer for windows, 
"explore2fs",  (ext3 is ext2 plus a journal so if the thing goes down, most 
if all data is fully recovered. Wish windows could do that!). I would not use 
it for writing filese, though it can.
 

Not sure if this has been covered in this thread or not, but XP and 
Linux can both utilize (read and write) FAT32 so if you are interested 
in transfering data between the two, a FAT32 data transfer partition is 
a good way to do that.

A simple partitioning scheme might be this:
hda1 - XP on NTFS
hda2 - Debian  / (root) on Ext3
hda3 - Debian swap
hda6 (probably a logical drive on an extended partition) - data transfer 
on FAT32

This could / should be expanded to include another partition for home 
(/home) for Debian on Ext3

RRP
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