Dual Booting

Dual Booting

Dual booting refers to installing more than one operating system (OS) on your computer. You can only load (and run) one operating system at a time, but you can have multiple operating systems installed. During boot-up if you have more than one operating system installed you will be presented with a menu asking you which OS you want to load. You can dual (triple, or quadruple) boot any combination of operating systems but, the most common combination used with Linspire is: Microsoft Windows and Linspire OS.

Please note: setting up a dual boot sytem is an advanced operation which requires knowlege of computers and is: a) not recommended for novice users and b) is NOT officially supported by Linspire, Inc. Please refer to the official Linspire support policy. If you submit questions to the Linspire support staff about dual booting they will not be able to assist you. However, you can submit these types of questions to the Linspire Community Forums.

Setting up a dual boot system requires that you do the following:

1. You must partition your hard drive using a 3rd party partitioning software like Partition Magic, Boot-It NG, fdisk, or cfdisk. This must be done before you attempt to install Linspire because there is no built-in partitioning utility in the Linspire installer.

2. Once you have your partitions created you must install the other operating system first! (This is very important!). So, if you plan on setting up a dual boot system with Microsoft Windows and Linspire you must install Microsoft Windows on one of your partitions first.

3. After you have Microsoft Windows installed, you run the Linspire installation and choose "Advanced" during the installation. Here you tell Linspire to install to the other empty partition where you do not have Windows installed (if you choose the wrong partition it will overwrite your Windows installation).

4. When you finish installing Linspire and after you reboot you will be given a "boot menu" when the system starts up. It will ask you what OS you want to load.

Notes:

You can find more information about multiboot systems:

Hint 301 - (5.0) Fix Dual Boot with Linspire and Windows

Hint 312 - Setting Up for Dual-Boot

It is highly recommended that when you install Microsoft Windows that you select "Fat32" as the format for your partition. The default is usually "NTFS" but, this is a proprietary format from Microsoft and you may experience trouble writing to this type of partition. (You will be able to read to it but not write to it).

Hard Drive Racks

Another method of "fool-proof" dual booting is to have a hardrive racks (aka Hard drive trays) and you physically swap hard drives (each having a different OS on it). The trays are not too expensive ($10-30) and doesn't take too much technical knowledge. The downside is you cannot share info between the hardrives. The way around that is too have an secondary harddrive that any OS can use. Google or search forums for more info.

Last Modified 12/26/05 11:57 PM

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