On Sat, 30 Sep 2006, Arthur Maciel wrote:

> Can anybody recommend an up-to-date step by step "howto" for
> setting up dual boot on a now WindowsXP (Toshiba Satellite) 
> laptop ? Preferably for the non-expert, non-jargon-savy,
> half-dimwitted...(better give up?) 

Not a step-by-step guide, but, given a delivered system which comes 
with XP occupying the whole disk, we basically re-size the XP 
partition (as partition 1) using Partition Magic, and then install SL 
as normal onto the available space.  Installation all pretty much 
takes care of itself, choosing Grub as the booter. In practice we use 
a kickstart file to configure the installation, but there's nothing 
particularly special, from the operator's point of view, about the 
fact that it's a dual boot installation.

With modern hardware and BIOSes, the various dire warnings that get 
issued about partitions possibly not being bootable above various size 
thresholds can be ignored.

It can be useful to create a fat32 partition, which can be used for 
easy interchange of documents between the two OSes.  This would become 
the D: disk in Windows, and in Linux it can be mounted, say at /win

Trivia point: Grub by default calls the Windows partition "DOS".  
Easily changed if you don't appreciate the joke.

Another trivia point: you have to shut Windows down before doing the
above.  Hibernation is not enough.

The other oddity that has bitten us is that if you allow the SL 
installer to automatically partition the disk, then Partition Magic 
(PM) is inclined to report that the partition table is irreparably 
broken. (This issue has been discussed on the list some time back). 
It's cleaner to do the SL partition allocation by dropping into a 
shell at that point, and creating the partitions with fdisk.  This can 
also be scripted, of course.

Personally I haven't found a better way than PM to reliably re-size 
partitions while preserving their contents.  However, the versions of 
PM that I have used do not support ext3 journalling.  The workaround 
if you want to resize SL ext3 partitions is to boot-up a Live CD (we 
use knoppix, but no doubt SL Live would be just as good) and turn off 
the journalling on the relevant file system(s) using the tune2fs 
command.  Then re-size the partition with PM, and afterwards, use the 
Live CD again to turn journalling on again.

hope these notes are useful.

p.s I actually define a fat32 partition in between the XP partition 
and the main SL partition.  Then, if space gets short in either of 
those partitions, it's fairly easy to move the partition boundary, by 
increasing the size of the relevant partition at the cost of the fat32 
partition, without having to move anything else.