UNIX for Advanced & Expert Users

I am trying to implement a dual boot on my laptop ... using a small xp partition and fedora core 269.1-fc2 i686 linux kernel.. so far I have had to log off and reboot to enter the other partition... but this is getting frustrating.. windows is on /dev/hda1 and 1-5 is on the linux partition. I have read several different procedures to start a dual boot, one using lilo, one using grub and one invoking the boot of both windows and linux on start-up of lilo using a script.. so far I have had no luck with finding the correct procedure using lilo and am not sure what to do to with grub how would I go about accomplishing this?... also if its not a problem! I have small question regarding dual boots.. is it possible to boot windows while linux is running.. or does it have to be done simultaneously at boot.
moxxx68

First of all, I would use GRUB instead of lilo. You can easily find a tutorial on linux.org or a quick google search. You should set up your partitions just as you have, but will only be able to boot one at a time. The only way you could load both OSes at once would be to use some kind of emulator like WINE. However, if you just want to access files, you can boot up your linux system and then access the files on the windows partition. (I believe FC2 has NTFS support, if not you can download it.)

You may just want to start over and install winxp first (allocating the partition size you want and letting the rest of the hdd be free), then install linux. Fedora should use GRUB and allow you to it up at the install. Once you restart you should be able to pick between windows and linux from the grub interface.

Hope this helps,
Robert

Dual booting does not imply booting both simultaneously. It just means the options of selecting either or.
If running both systems at the same time were possible. Then there would not be a need for applications such as Wine, Bochs, Plex86, Vmware, VPC.

Install GNU/Linux, then install something like Bochs or obtain a trial of VMware, then setup the virtual machine to load Windows. Now, you can boot GNU/Linux and run the virtual machine which will load MS Windows. Now, you will have both operating systems running at the same time.

Any platform can only boot one OS at a time. People who create systems that can boot multiple OSs do so, so they can run different OS, as they need them; not so they can boot multiple OS at the same time, that is not currently possible on any system.

Let me bring another option to your attention. See Unix environments for MS Windows.

How about colinux?
http://www.colinux.org/

Sounds interesting... is anyone using this? In any event, I have edited the FAQ to include a mention of colinux. Thanks for mentioning it.