On Thu, 3 Apr 2003, Amish K. Munshi wrote:
On Wednesday 02 April 2003 22:15, Sheetal Chopra [snip]....
I am now using an IBM ThinkPad A31p, with a partitioned hdd, with XP professional 'up front' on 20 GB, and 40GB saved for Linux.
Please use a little more descriptive subject, thanks. Access to control panel -> Administrative tools -> computer management -> disk management and give us detailed description of your HDD partitions. Which are the primary/secondary/logical size of each partition.
I don't think Sheetal was asking for how to check harddisk partitions. I wish people take time to see what is asked.
[snip]
I also tried RedHat 8.00., but the dual boot didn't work, then XP
Be prepared to spend time with GNU/LInux, it is great to learn things yourself, sooner or later you will enjoy the hacking GNU/Linux youself. We can only help you in learning to hack and not help you hack specific things. Just trust any one distribution and install it. Suggestion again is to stick to RedHat Linux 8.0.
People please try to answer genuine questions, The person has mentioned that dual boot configuration of WinXP and RedHat 8.0 didn't work and that XP replaced the boot block back.
Sheetal, this may happen if you perform Windows Update or if you have any Anti-Virus software watching for changes to disk. XP's system restore functionality may also do this if you initiated a restore operation. In dual-boot systems, the normal course of action is to install Windows first and then install Linux and install a boot loader like GRUB or LILO. Alternatively you can also edit boot.ini in WinXP to load Linux from XP's boot menu. Look for boot loader howtos on www.tldp.org, on what is possible. I would like to mention in passing for others that setting up a dual-boot system is no-where close to 'hacking'. Amish's suggestion of using RHL 8.0 is a good one, as it is a nice and stable distro. However RHL 9.0 is out, (well for public on 7th April), and there have been some good reviews of it on net, specially the one from Guru Labs. If you get your hands on it, it might solve many of your problems, else you can always post here with right subject lines.
A quick check on www.linux-laptops.com, reveals many links for Thinkpad A31p, e.g. see this page http://www.linux-on-laptops.com/ibm.html Seems like this laptop works with RedHat/Debian/SuSe.
Best regards, Rajesh