Dual Booting with Windows XP?

budGibson asks: "I have just purchased a Dell system for home that will be arriving shortly with Windows ME installed. It has a (free) upgrade coupon for Windows XP. After using Windows 2000 on a development machine at work, XP is attractive because of its likely good stability for a Windows. Although I prefer Linux, compatibility with my graduate and undergraduate business students requires that I have some version of Windows." Put simply, is XP dual-boot friendly?

"I am familiar with dual-booting (and the pratfalls of dual booting) using various versions of Win9x. I understand NT is harder because of the way bootloader installs and also the fact that it uses NTFS. Windows XP sounds like it will be harder still because of its "registration" feature. I have searched in Redhat (my preferred distribution) and at the LDP (Linux Documentation Project) but have not found any treatment of this.

I think one option might be the commercial product Partition Magic by PowerQuest but would prefer to stick with an open-source method, preferrably one supported by a distribution. Does anyone have any experience with or insights about dual-booting with XP? Have I missed some treasure-trove of documentation?"

Comments

Per Microsoft

[eric2hill]

Search Microsoft and ye shall find the answer.

Re:Per Microsoft

[eric2hill]

And in case you don't know, install Linux first onto it's own partition, then XP on a second primary partition. Installing XP second will set it's boot manager to default. You'll simply need to add Linux to the BOOT.INI file (on the root of the boot drive, where the NT loader is). Documentation on the BOOT.INI file is available all over the web.