[Techtalk] Installing XP without affectin Linux

[Wim De Smet]

On Thu, Apr 2, 2009 at 11:20 PM, Christine Bussman
<olearyck at geek-den.net> wrote:
> David Sumbler wrote:
>>
>> The spare partition is /dev/hda1, and my current Linux / is
>> on /dev/hda7.  There is already an appropriate entry
>> in /boot/grub/menu.lst for booting Windows on /dev/hda1 - I used to have
>> Win98 on there, so apart from changing the name perhaps, I do not need
>> to touch menu.lst .
>>
> It's helpful that it's /dev/hda1 that you're planning to put windows on,
> because I would not be 100% sure that even XP would be nice installing
> elsewhere, especially with an OS it didn't recognize in the first partition.
>> As I understand it, then, all I need to do is the following:
>>
>> 1) Install WinXP on /dev/hda1 ; OK to format in NTFS?
>>
> If possible, it would be better not to use ntfs because Linux usually
> can't write to ntfs.  However, when I dual boot I often make the system
> partition in windows be ntfs and then have a small fat32 partition, so
> there is someplace on the hard drive I can write to from both operating
> systems.

It seems ntfs write support is now being rolled into most distros. At
least the latest ubuntu seems to have it. In all other you can use
ntfs-3g. I've not read any horror stories and it's got tons of users
now, so I'd assume it's pretty safe to just use ntfs.

About the steps listed in the previous mail: those all look alright to me.

regards,
Wim