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.