Dual Booting With Common Sense

Every time we head down this path, I end up with the “dual-booting” is great crowd, often because they fully understand how to deal with the boot record and various partitions involved. For most people, goto to ANY Linux forum and you will see the “success” of that mindset.

Still, there are some safe ways of booting more than one operating system from the same PC. Below are some of the best and least likely to lead to the usual round of panic and frustration as the traditional dual-booting with Windows and Linux.

• Acronis Disk Director Suite (Long Term solution) - Unless you are experienced in dual-booting operating systems like Vista and Ubuntu together, you might want to consider this option. Safely install other OS’ without the panic of making a mistake.
• VirtualBox - (Short Term solution) Honestly, if you are merely looking to play with Linux on occasion, for the love of commonsense, installing a virtual installation. Don’t try to dual-boot blind.
• Wubi - (Long Term solution) I don’t really like Wubi for this sort of thing as much as the options above, but it is certainly another option.

Don’t get me wrong, clearly using an eight page guide to installing multiple OS’ is the super user friendly…but some people might like to make this happen without investing a weekend learning how not to install over the wrong partition or what to do when GRUB/Lilo fails to play nicely with Vista.