Dual Booting

[The Unknown]

Yes, I know, this is the WORST question ever...I feel like a dumbass, especially because there's a howto that isn't even on the forums, it's a site link, but I'm confused and don't want to mess up when partitioning. I have two drives, a C and a D and I live boot Backtrack 4 Final off a flash drive. Simple stuff. Recently I decided I want to install the amazing OS and when it comes up to partition, it wants to write to the "entire drive", which I can only assume is both C and D. I only want it to write to D.

tl;dr how can I make Backtrack 4 final install to only one of my hard drives and take up all of the available space?

[2lood]

I only want it to write to D....

From my experience, it's best if you prepared D drive in windows first.
That would be:
delete whole partition

• create partition in the unpartitioned space [say 90% of space]
• create another partition in the rest of unpartitioned space [this '10%' should be the size of your RAM]

filesystem you choose now is not important. I highly recommend that you restart windows [don't ask]
Now reboot and start LiveCD installer and when you come to point where you have to select disk for installation, go to advanced (or custom ). That's where you select that '90%' sized partition to be root of your BT,and that 'RAM sized partition' to be the swap partition.
I chose filesystem for root ext2 [was unsure].check filesystems
Then you'll need to find the option to install grub boot manager and select it. Proceed the rest of installation. It worked form me on WinXP with vista boot manager installed but i bet it works with other windows versions.
hope this was helpful

[mfBaranian]

You can choose manual installation when in partitioner and arrange the partitions as you like (you'll need one ext3 mount /, and a swap about the size of your ram memory). And the installer will setup the grub for you.

[The Unknown]

From my experience, it's best if you prepared D drive in windows first.
That would be:
delete whole partition

• create partition in the unpartitioned space [say 90% of space]
• create another partition in the rest of unpartitioned space [this '10%' should be the size of your RAM]

filesystem you choose now is not important. I highly recommend that you restart windows [don't ask]
Now reboot and start LiveCD installer and when you come to point where you have to select disk for installation, go to advanced (or custom ). That's where you select that '90%' sized partition to be root of your BT,and that 'RAM sized partition' to be the swap partition.
I chose filesystem for root ext2 [was unsure].check filesystems
Then you'll need to find the option to install grub boot manager and select it. Proceed the rest of installation. It worked form me on WinXP with vista boot manager installed but i bet it works with other windows versions.
hope this was helpful

Alright, I think I know which one is D by the size of it. I have an old partition, 15GB of my D drive, that I used for Ubuntu. Can I just delete that and it will automatically reallocate to the D drive?

[2lood]

Alright, I think I know which one is D by the size of it.....

I mentioned that you prepare D partition in Windows, not in BT4 installation setup. That should be done by splitting D in 2 parts, so that would give you an extra E drive which you should size according to your RAM.
Why all that? Although windows is 'blind' to Linux partitions it's still 'aware' of them. If you just do all this from BT4 partitioner, later when you try to boot windows you can end up with disk structure error or 'system32\hal.dll not found' like i did. So do it from windows to make it aware of the new (E: ) disk.
So, if you have i.e. 2GB of RAM, E: should be 2GB, and D: 13GB (the rest of available space).
Now boot BT4 installation and when in partitioner choose manual installation and select 13GB disk to be root and 2GB disk to be swap.
Grub boot manager should be checked.

[ibrahimdh]

Grub boot manager should be checked.

What is Grub boot manager if i may ask? sorry for being too green. then how do you create those partition with D:

[lupin]

What is Grub boot manager if i may ask? sorry for being too green. then how do you create those partition with D:

These are exactly the type of questions that Google can help you answer. If someone mentions some term "X" in a post, and you don't know what term "X" refers to, Google it before posting back and asking "What is X?"

[2lood]

What is Grub boot manager if i may ask? sorry for being too green. then how do you create those partition with D:

Disk_partitioning

[1pernar]

I have Linux Mint on my netbook. My question is following

a) Is it possible to make dual boot (Mint + BT4) and resizing partition (Mint) without having to reinstall already installed Linux system.

b) Is it possible to make netbook automatically booting Mint (with no delay) unless I press esc when I start system?

[2lood]

It should be possible, I have never tried it though. The first step should be to make space for root partition for BT4, therefore shrinking Mint partition. As for the swap, I think it can be mutual for both systems but you should check that before installing.
BT4 uses old Grub so modify /boot/grub/menu.lst and activate #hiddenmenu option by removing # sign in front of it. Also set the timeout=1 for 1 second time to wait if you want to press ESC to view menu.

I am not familiar with Mint so please report your success.