This is for anyone who has a Windows 7 machine and is interested in setting it up to dual boot Fedora 17. It is my hope that reading this will save you the four nights of head-scratching that I went through as a newbie to the process.
- Get yourself a Live CD of Fedora. You can download it here. Once you have the image downloaded, burn it to a CD using software like ImgBurn.
- Get a Live CD of a partitioning program like Partition Wizard.
- Download and install EasyBCD.
- Put in the Live CD of the partitioning program and reboot your machine.
- Once the CD boots, you should be presented with an interface that shows you how your hard disks are partitioned - how they are split up into multiple drives like C: and D: for Windows.
- You should be able to shrink partitions to create Unallocated Space. Be careful to leave enough room for Windows though.
- If the Unallocated Space is a primary partition, convert it to a logical partition. Now you should be able to create new partitions with this space. If not, then you may need to convert an adjacent partition to a logical partition as well.
- Out of the Unallocated Space, create the following partitions:
- /boot - 250 MB
- swap - Read this for recommended size.
- / - Remaining space
- After applying the changes, reboot your PC with the Fedora Live CD.
- Once the Live CD version of Fedora boots, you should be able to select "Install to Hard Disk" from the desktop. The only tricky part to the installation process is setting the partitions you created to the proper types. You will need to set the boot partition to "/boot", the swap partition to "swap", and the other partition to "/" which is root.
- Once the installation process is done, boot into Windows and run EasyBCD.
- In EasyBCD, go to "Add/Remove Entries", choose the "Linux" tab from the bottom-half of the EasyBCD screen, and then choose the partition that you installed Fedora to earlier from the drop-down menu, then press "Add Entry" to save the changes. You should be able to set the boot preference and boot screen wait time with this tool.
- Reboot! You should see a screen allowing you to choose between Windows 7 and Fedora. Now you can boot between the two!
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