1. INTRODUCTION

Bill Wohler wrote in his v1.1 of The Linux+WindowsNT mini-HOWTO:

"Due to hardware or software problems or user headroom, I pulled my hair out for several days trying to get both NT and Linux happily settled on my new HP Vectra PC at work."

I could say that was true in my case too, but you really have a way to make both Linux and Windows NT co-existing on the same machine and to switch from one of them to another.

"Under no circumstances run the Disk Administrator from NT 3.51 to format partitions. It asks if it can write a signature "which will cause absolutely no harm." When it did this, it hosed my partition table until fixed by steps 3 and 7 below. Because of these problems, I was limited to one FAT NT partition. Also remember that even if you do get the Disk Administrator to work, you'll want at least one small FAT partition to use as a staging area for exchanging files between Linux and NT until Linux has an NTFS filesystem."

Well, NT's Disk Administrator is sufficient tool to check what situation on your hard disk(s) you have, before and after you used an utility called Partition Magic by Power Quest. This utility might be needed to 'shrink' your NT (either NTFS or FAT) partition, in order to get some free space for your further Linux' partitions. (After a while, I recognized that 'shrinking' used partition might not be needed. Actually, if you start from 'scratch', it might be the best way to re-format your whole disk(s) using FDISK command. You should make a DOS boot floppy diskete where DOS commands FDISK and FORMAT have to be also copied. More details later...)

"I installed Linux first and then NT, but based on my experience, I might now be able to install NT first and then Linux."

Of course you all are able to install Windows NT first and after that Linux. We'll see how to do that and how to use LILO (Linux Loader) to chose which operating system to boot. But, before that we'll see the procedure that Bill Wohler, the previous maintainer of this mini-HOWTO, has been using: