DDS and TI dual boot questions

I'm a long time XP True image user. I own DDS 10.0 but have never used it. I'd like to dual boot Xp pro and freespire on my c drive (74 gig). I hope to use True image 9 and DDS 10.0 and create bootable media with both on it. I have a 320 gig internal sata drive that's in a removable drive bay that I generally image to. I've searched the forums extensively but can't find what I want. I'd like to image and potentially restore both the XP and freespire partitions. What file systems should be used? What install order should be followed? Is anyone doing something similar that can point me to guides, links or the threads I missed? Thanks in advance for any help.

 

feddup:

TI can back up Linux partitions just fine. I regularly back up my laptop which contains Windows XP and Kubuntu Linux using TI9. I've restored the Linux partitions several times and TI works flawlessly, so yes, you can definitely do what you want.

The filesystem type that you should use for Linux is up to you; what does Freespire recommend? If they don't give a recommendation then probably ext3 is your best choice. It's a journaling filesystem (like NTFS) that is more robust than ext2. Or your could use ReiserFS, but Reiser takes a long time to check its journal at every boot. Unless you're running a server I'd pick ext3.

If you already have Windows installed then your best bet is to use DD10 to create the partition layout that you desire for your Freespire installation. Usually you would want a partition for root (/), a separate one for home, and a swap partition. The Freespire forums can probably give you additional guidance on how to best partition your disk, and the Freespire installer will probably guide you further.

Just be sure that during installation you install the GRUB bootloader to the Linux root (/) partition when given the choice. See this article:
http://wiki.freespire.org/index.php/Writing_Grub_to_the_Root_Partition Do not install GRUB to the Master Boot Record (MBR). Then use DD10 to set the Linux root partition as Active.

The advantage of doing it this way is that if you want to dump Freespire later and go back to only Windows, all you have to do is use DD10 to set the Windows partition as Active. Then you can delete the Linux partitions and you're back to where you started.

 

Fat32?

I'm a complete linux newbie so forgive my ignorance please. Can linux access Fat32? I was wondering if there was a disk format that could be accessed by xp and linux for data. Also I can't seem to find the post but I remember someone posting an install order for windows, linux, disk director and true image that yielded both DD and TI on the bootable media.

 

No problem. Things can look pretty confusing at first but you'll soon figure it out. Yes, Linux can read and write to FAT32 partitions. It can also read NTFS partitions but at the moment it can't write to them reliably. Write support to NTFS is just around the corner, according to the Freespire roadmap, so someday soon you will be able to use NTFS partitions to share data between the two operating systems.

Currently if you want to share data in both directions (read and write from either OS) you need to either use a FAT32 partition for this purpose or else you need to install a driver in Windows that lets Windows read and write to ext2 or ext3 partitions.

http://www.fs-driver.org/

You don't need any particular OS install order to get both TI and DD on bootable media; that option is available to you when you create images with TrueImage as long as you have both products installed. And one image file can contain backups of multiple partitions of both Windows and Linux. And if you put the image on bootable media the media can also contain the standalone (bootable) versions of both DD and TI.

 

Thanks for the help!

I'm just checking out options. I guess now I'm going to have to try it. Thanks for info and links.