Partitioning - Dual Booting - Hard-Drive Imaging

Tutorial

by entropy

You'll find in this guide the instruction's to ( hopefully ) help you whether you want to Partition your Hard-Drive, create a Dual Boot machine running a combination of either Windows 9x, 2000, Xp and/or Linux, ( Note: I'm a Windows man, so this tutorial won't guide you to install Linux, but you'll @ least be able to create the Partition ), then when you're finished, create an Image for when something goes wrong at a later time - & let's face it, we all love to muck around & play, not leaving well enough alone

It'd be egotistical of me to not point out that this is MY way of doing things and that there are other ways too, but I wanted to write a tutorial with the absolute beginner in mind, a tutorial to just get you up & running without cluttering your mind with all that geek speak. But if you really want to punish yourself, I've also included a separate Techno Babble page

Programs/tools you'll need:

PowerQuest's Partition Magic ( self explanatory )
PowerQuest's Boot Magic ( comes with PQ's Partition Magic )
PowerQuest's Drive Image

OR...as an alternative to having different floppies lying around, you can grab a copy of Hiren's Ultimate Boot Disk, it has all the above tools ( + many xtra's ) on 1 CD

These aren't the only programs available to do the same job/s, there are other's eg: Nortons Ghost ( for Imaging your Hard-Drive ), but they're my personal favourites & they've never let me down

 

A special needed mentioning here

If you're going to be doing all this on a Hard-Drive you already have set up, I STRONGLY suggest you back up ALL your important personal data, pictures etc
eg: Favourites, Email, Address book, FTP sites etc ( you'll find a good list of backup idea's here by Mykilx )
It's possible to leave your existing OS (Operating System) as is, but I've seen that fellow *Murphy* hanging around here, and he loves getting up to mischief

Having said all that, let's get into it

P.S
You won't find much of a mention of Win ME in these pages
The reason being that because it's such a crappy OS (Operating System), I usually forget it exists, but for those unfort...I mean, those who still persevere with it, Win ME has the same characteristics as Win 9x when mentioned throughout these pages

 

Partitioning Dual Booting Imaging

Click --> here <-- for a downloadable copy