Hi everyone,

I hope this question goes here. Anyways, I have a unique situation where my friend's comp has Fedora installed and wants to add Win XP as a dual boot without formatting the drive. Is it possible to create a partition on the current hard drive and then install win xp? I couldn't find any guides on this so if anyone could give me some steps or point me to a guide that'd be great. I hope this is even possible.

Elt

Only if there is a way to reduce the size of the linux partition, or the linux partition does not use all of the disk.
Disk drives are so cheap, why not just add a second drive for XP.

hmm so basically there is no way then? well this computer is for a lab and we dont have the funding to purchase an extra hard drive. is there any sort of software that can fix this partitioning?

yes, it is possible, but it really is a lot easier the other way around becasue most modern linux installers are quite happy to coexist with windows, but windows is not so accommodating.

Assuming that the disk is fully allocated to partitions you will need to use something like the GParted -- LiveCD in order to resize the partitions. You will then install windows on the new partition, and then boot back to fedora and reconfigure and reinstall grub on the MBR.

Just like reborg said, GParted -- LiveCD is one such tool.

However a point to note, when you install Windows after Linux, you wont be able to boot Linux as windows boot loader will rewrite the grub settings for MBR. (its m$ afterall)

You might wanna run a grub-install /dev/hda (or whatever is your primary drive) to fix the issue and get a dual boot screen during boot up

~s4g3