Setting up Gentoo /w a Windows Partition?


Recommended Posts

Hey all,

I want to install Gentoo Linux but I want to dual boot with Windows...usually, when I installed Red Hat, it would do it for me, but since Gentoo is harder to set up, how would I go about doing this ? Also, what would I install first? Any help would be appreciated.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Install Windows first. Make sure you know exactly what partition windows is on. Then when it comes to setting up your bootloader, just follow the instructions in the gentoo install guide - they're pretty comprehensive and tell you exactly what lines you need to add to your grub.conf to get it to work with windows.

The only thing the install guide doesn't cover is if you want to install windows on a slave drive... normally windows refuses to work on a slave drrive, but with some creative fooling around with config files you can convince it that its on the master drive when its not.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I'm thinking of just adding it all onto one drive.

Should I use Partition Magic to make the Partitions via Windows, or should I just do it all via FDisk on the Gentoo2004 Live CD?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

;) The installation is one thing that always intimidated me with Gentoo, for all this distribution looks great. It would be nice if they had a GUI install as an option for less advanced users, even if you saw it compiling in a gui for ages ... Once the install was over you could do eveything the old fashioned way :p

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I'm thinking of just adding it all onto one drive.

Should I use Partition Magic to make the Partitions via Windows, or should I just do it all via FDisk on the Gentoo2004 Live CD?

Personally, I'd use partition magic to just create some blank space on the drive with no partitions there at all, then use fdisk during the install to setup you linux partitions on the blanks space.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Or, instead of Partition Magic, you can start an install of Mandy or something that will parititon for you (I think Mandy will do some resizing, too - maybe others do too now.. I dunno).

I know it is cheating, but it will set you up rather nicely with ready paritions for a Gentoo install, I think. ;)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Question: Let's say I had Windows installed on one partition that took up the whole drive. I poot up the Gento2004 CD and I go into to fdisk? What exactly would I do, especially when I have a Windows partition already? Any ideas?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

you can't resize an existing ntfs partition in the gentoo install. If you can't resize the partition with a win32 based tool, then you should grab the latest knoppix ISO and use the partition manager on that.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

This topic is now closed to further replies.
  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.