Double boot xp and ubuntu

[sunnyshah]

I recently installed ubuntu and was wondering the methods of double booting.

 

[amdfangirl]

There are two primary ways, dual booting on the same disk or dual booting on separate disk. Both have their good points and bad.

 

[audiovoodoo]

If you have a spare disk then the easy way to avoid much in the way of configuration is to install it as an independent OS and then to change your boot priority to boot from the other disk. It also has the advantage that you can boot into the other OS if anything ever happens to your other one.

Dual booting XP/Ubuntu from the same disk works well and there are lots of guides on Ubuntu forums on how to do this. If you already have a spare partition on your disk it's not that hard to do. If your disk is all XP then you can re-size the partitions and install it along side XP.

 

[sabot00]

1. Partition your drive, shrink the xp partition to leave some free space. Then when installing ubuntu use the "use largest continuous free space".

2. Use 2 HDD's, pretty much the same thing as partitioning but the xp drive manager can't shrink its own partition, unlike vista, so this saves having to use a 3rd-party drive manager since when you install a HDD it comes as a seperate partition unless you unite both into a spanned partition. Wipe the other hdd and then install ubuntu to it.

3. Use Wubi to install ubuntu into xp just like a application, also very easy to uninstall but that's where the pro's end. Vista's UAC and other advanced secrity settings can cause a lot of errors and ubuntu is slower at least that's the case in 8.04 (I don't know if wubi improved in 8.10). Also you can't hiberate.

4. Use a networked drive. ONLY FOR VERY ADV USERS AND COOPERATE MANAGERS
Use a networked drive and a boot-loader that supports network booting. In laymen's terms you boot off of a HDD connected by ethernet. Boot from a HDD with ubuntu or install ubuntu to a networked HDD. Of course this rarely is used by home owners.

That's all the dual-boot methods I know.

 

[linux_0]

PXE it

 

[sabot00]

PXE?

 

[linux_0]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preboot_Execution_Environment

 

[sabot00]

Well it's basically network-booting, I'm not going into all the different boot-loaders and such.