trying to create dual boot system with acronis os selector

[kkjaved]

Hello,

I have windows vista system to which i want to install fedora 14 on. I have alloted 50 gb of free space to do this. Acronis os selector allows me to chose which operating system to boot from so I do not have a concern about this.

My question is on the installation of fedora, rather than "use all space option" can I "create custom layout" to install the fedora on the 50 gb of free space that I have created? I would not know what to do after I selected this option, however, because i am straying from the install instructions on the fedora14 install guide.

If anyone knows what I can do, that would be great.

Thanks,
khurram

[t800]

I have a triple boot for system of XP, Win7 and Linux which may offer you some clues. I have no idea as I don't use Acronis. But using the GRUB in the linux of choice may work out easer for you in the long run than setting up the /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.28-11-server and the /boot/initrd.img required to boot fedora from another booter ? This is how mine works, which is actually a mirror raid pair. But the principle is the same for single drive.

Firstly I partition the drive and then installed XP and then installed Win7 allowing Win7 to setup the MS boot manger to handle alternate boot of XP or Win7.

The snag was the MBR system is it only allows you to boot from one of the max of four primary partitions on the drive. Logical drives are not natively boolable by the BIOS as they as stored in an extended table. Or you can have up to 3 primary partitions and extended partition table containing a number of logical partitions. (Please note this is an MBR not gpt as OS's such as XP doesn't recognise GPT partitions).Tip: Allows put the extended last on the end of the drive and fill the drive as other OS's will get moody if you put and extended in the middle of drive with a primary either side.

My setup has...
partition 1 as XP (ntfs)
partition 2 as small ext3 partion for linux /boot marked as bootable in the table. Mines around 75mb but it depends on your min sector size.
partition 3 is a linux ext4 for '/'
Partition 4 is extended. First logical is win7... a number of storage ntfs and ext4 partitions and the last is a SWAP partition of 2gb.

After installing the MS stuff I grab linux and install using a manual partition setup for bootable partition 2 not MBR. Partion 2 is my small ext3 or 4 set bootable as '/boot'. Set partition 3 as '/' and the last logical as swap. When you reach the GRUB setup of the installation add Partition 1 as a chain boot device sda1 or hda1 depending on your drive type. It really is that simple. When the install is complete and you reboot and if it boots windows use a drive util to change the partition 2 as the active boot partition, fedora doesn't allows do this for some reason? Ranish is good tool for this. Try again and it should boot GRUB allowing to choose Microsoft or Linux, then from Microsoft XP or WIN7.

With the xp win7 combo win7 im using the bootmgr in XP which is a primary partition so it can install win7 into a logical partition. Thus you you cant directly boot win7 from grub. It has to be via XP.

Linux systems boot very differently to windows. To boot a linux system involves a sequence of leaps of faith to kernel from a bootstrap loader. Can can find more information out on this at http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/vie ... /grub.html. But GRUB is a good tool for multiple booting and quite a powerful tool for the brave hearted There is lot to be accessed via Acconda.

Other multi boot alternatives? The Syslinux Project covers lightweight boot loaders covering most devices and systems. GRUB4DOS is good for playing with boot sequence on USB. EasyBCD is nice tool for Windows which claims to add other OS's like linux to yours windows bootmanger?

I hope this helps or at least offers some clues?