On Thursday 18 November 2004 11:20,
debian-user-digest-request@lists.debian.org wrote:
As mentioned in my previous mail, I'll run a dual-OS system. Since l have
only one drive, I'll divide it into two partitions, one for Win XP and one
for Debian. I think this is a good way to start off. When one fails, I can
use the other to troubelshoot via the Web. I forsee doing this a lot in the
initial stage.
As another poster has said, you need a swap partition as well, 1-2x RAM.
Question
1. How easy is it to switch from one OS to another? Is rebooting the only
way?
You set up lilo or grub and boot to one or the other. If you use paritionmagic
(costs), they have a bootmagic utility to handle this as well.
You might look into "colinux". Whether it will run off your linux installation
I do not know. It can boot knoppix and run it in a window.
2. Linux uses ext2 or ext3 filesystem, XP uses NTFS. Can files be swap
between the two? More likely I wouldl be copying Linux file to XP, e.g. log
files required for troubleshooting
There are, as posted, other alternatives as well. Ext3 is simplest, I think.
Linux can mount NTFS read-only but has full FAT32 support.
I will send you on private cover, a little ext2 file explorer for windows,
"explore2fs", (ext3 is ext2 plus a journal so if the thing goes down, most
if all data is fully recovered. Wish windows could do that!). I would not use
it for writing filese, though it can.