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Bernhard Rupp wrote: .. > > Partition Magic got high recommendations for dual boot. > I would say dual boot is a non-issue and doesn't require any extra software, since both windows and linux have powerful boot loaders of their own. If you install windows first and then linux, i think all distributions will detect the windows and by default set up a boot option for windows. Certainly the red-hat/centos/fedora distro's i've installed do so. That way you don't have to learn how to use Partition Magic. Ed PS- If you installed windows second, it might clear the MBR where the linux boot sector might be, but you can recover easily even if you didn't make a boot floppy by booting a GRUB floppy, "find /etc/fstab" to see which partition has the linux, then use grub "setup" to reinstall the boot sector to the mbr or to the boot sector of a partition (other than the windows partition) where it will do no harm. In the latter case, go on and boot into linux, dd the sector from wherever you put it, to a medium that both windows and linux can access (dd if=/dev/sda2 of=/mnt/pendrive/bootsect.lnx bs=512 count=1). Reboot into windows and copy the boot sector to c:\ and add to c:\boot.ini a line: C:\bootsect.lnx="Linux" Now the ntloader menu will contain an option "Linux" . Assuming the linux loader menu has an option "Windows", you can, on bootup, hop back and forth between the two menus indefinitely until you decide which to boot from. Caveats- -For added security, if you install windows second make a linux boot floppy first -I forgot computers don't have floppy drives anymore. presumably this can be done from a cdrom, or from a flash drive if you configure the bios to boot a USB hard disk. Or dd the bootsector to a file on a flash drive before installing windows. - the grub stuff is off the top of my head, you may need to "info grub" for more details. Grub may be a little more difficult to learn than partition magic, but the knowledge will be far more useful. - never "dd" a bootsector back onto a partition bootsector or MBR. These sectors contain disk-specific info (disk geometry, FAT filesystem params, partition table).