Dual-booting Windows and Linux the easy way

Dual-booting does not have to be scary! Just take a look below for proof of this.

The Gnome Partition Editor Live CD is a simple tool that will shrink a (usually “the”) Windows partition on your hard drive, then make Linux partitions almost automatically. These four videos step you through the process of downloading GPartEd (the program’s nickname) from SourceForge.net, defragmenting Windows, shrinking your Windows partition, and installing the three most commonly-used Linux partitions. As a free bonus, a fifth video will show you how to uninstall Linux and stretch your shrunk-down Windows partitition until it once again takes up your whole hard drive.

All popular Linux distributions now have some sort of simple (usually GUI) disk partitioning utility included. If you’re going to devote an entire hard drive to Linux, you might as well go with your chosen distribution’s default partition setup. But if you want to boot Windows and Linux on the same computer, you may be better off making your partitions with a specialized partitioning tool. Norton Commander is a pretty good one, although it is neither free of cost nor free in the free software sense. There are plenty of other proprietary partitioners out there, too, but free GPartEd is all we need to handle simple partition resizing…. Source: Linux.com

[tags]windows,linux,hard drive,dual-booting[/tags]