Appendix G. Configuring a Dual Boot System

125

Note

Many people have successfully used FIPS to repartition their hard drives. However, because of the

nature of the operations carried out by FIPS, and the wide variety of hardware and software con 

figurations under which it must run, Red Hat cannot guarantee that FIPS will work properly on your

system. Therefore, no installation support whatsoever is available for FIPS; use it at your own risk.

That said, if you decide to repartition your hard drive with FIPS, it is vital that you do two things:

Perform a Backup   Make two copies of all the important data on your computer. These copies

should be to removable media (such as tape, CD ROM, or diskettes), and you should make sure

they are readable before proceeding.

Read the Documentation   Completely read the FIPS documentation, located in the

dosutils/fipsdocs

directory on the Red Hat Linux CD ROM 1.

Should you decide to use FIPS, be aware that after FIPS runs you will be left with two partitions:

the one you resized, and the one FIPS created out of the newly freed space. If your goal is to use that

space to install Red Hat Linux, you should delete the newly created partition, either by using fdisk

under your current operating system, or while setting up partitions during a custom class installation.

The following instructions are a simplified version of the FIPS documentation file,

fips.doc

, located

in the FIPS directory (

/dosutils/fips20/*

). These instructions should apply in most instances. If

you encounter any problems, see the documentation file.

1. From Windows:

Do a full backup.

Run scandisk to verify that the hard drive contains no bad clusters.

Decide how to distribute the available space on the hard drive between the operating systems.

Use Windows Explorer to see the free space on the drive. Make a note of the space (in

megabytes) that each operating system will have.

If you do not have one, create a Windows boot disk.

Creating a boot disk varies between different versions of Windows. Consult the Windows

documentation for instructions on creating a Windows boot disk.

The diskette will be formatted, and

COMMAND.COM

, along with the associated hidden files

(

IO.SYS

,

MSDOS.SYS

, and

DBLSPACE.BIN

), will be copied to the diskette.

Copy the following files on the Red Hat Linux CD ROM to the DOS boot disk.

dosutils/fips20/fips.exe

dosutils/fips20/restorrb.exe

dosutils/fips20/errors.txt

dosutils/fips20/fips.doc

dosutils/fips20/fips.faq

Defragment the hard drive so that all the data on the hard drive is located at the beginning of

the drive.

2. Insert the Windows boot disk into the floppy drive and reboot the system.

3. Start FIPS (type

fips

at the prompt).