I have a new laptop that I need to set up for dual booting. As much as I despise Microsoft, I have to use it for certain things. Such as some obscure peripherals, like my slide photo scanner, it doesn't support Linux and TD Ameritrade's streaming Java tools don't work the same as on Linux. Until corporation's smarten up Microsoft will be a problem.
The setup for dual booting seem pretty straight forward. Install windows first, then Linux, and modify the boot loader. However, I have a couple of question and observations. First, the observations. I tried to partition my disk with fdisk the way I wanted. It had the usual Linux partitions and a partition that I was going to use for Window 7. I wanted to make this an LVM2 partition, but that didn't work; I guess that was too ambitious. Then I just made it an ordinary static HPFS/NTFS partition on /dev/sda5. When installing Windows 7 it wouldn't install on that partition. I deleted all the partitions and just installed it on the first 50Gigs of the disk. Second, the questions. The Windows 7 install on the first 50Gigs of the disk needed to created two partitions. The first was a very small boot partition that I increased to 128Megs, and the second is the rest of Windows 7. Now when I boot to the livecd to partition the rest of the disk for Gentoo fdisk says "Partition 1 does not end on a cylinder boundary." Is this a problem? The other big question is: what do I do about the first partition in the partition table? It is an HPFS/NTFS partition and has been toggled bootable. It also has some stuff in it that looks like it's important to Windows: a BOOTSECT.BAK file, a Boot directory, a System Volume Information directory, and a bootmgr file. Now for my Gentoo install, how and where do I make a /boot partition? Do I replace the Windows 7 boot partition with /boot? If so, what happens to the contents? or Do I make a /boot partition on /dev/sda3 and toggle the bootable flag there? I apologize for the long story. Thanks in advance for all the help. dhk
