StarDestroyer.Net BBS

I have alot of pc games. Most won't run on wine. Not only does it annoy me that I can't play them but it makes me feel guilty considering the ammount I've spent on them. With this in mind, I just blew 91 dollars on an OEM copy of windows xp home edition (Fuck me if I'm paying like 40 extra dollars for shit I can do better with FOSS addons and getting Pro.) from newegg. Now, I've installed linux on a computer that has windows installed before but I've never done it the other way round as I'm doing now. First, My plan: Use a linux cd to re-partition the harddrive, about 25(real) gigs for linux(get this by reducing my current *nix partition)(including swap), 22 for music/shared files and 25 for 'doze (thus coming out at the 72 real gigs of my 80 gig hdd (stupid marketing fuckwits), boot into linux and move all my music and shit to the shared dumping ground, clear out all the games I currently have on here (they all have windows versions, so I figure I'll just reinstall them over there, except for the crappy ones that I never play and really have no reason to have) (between the games getting nuked and the music being moved I'll have plenty of breathing room in those 25 gigs. Plus I can always get another hdd with my semi-steady income this summer), Then install doze. Now on to the questions. I understand that windows tries to kill any currently installed operating systems under the guise of "removing un-identified file systems", this can be avoided by telling it not to, unfourtunately, it automatically kills the MBR and put's it's own into place. This can be fixed, I understand, but I don't know how. What will I have to do to put the proper MBR back in place so that It'll properly give me my dual booting options. Question numero dos. I use firefox as my browser. Is there a way to have both the windows and *nix instances of ff use a common bookmark file in the shared file space so that I don't have to constantly export and Import and go through all that shit yet still keep up bookmark continuity? Question numero tres. Is there anything else I should be keeping in mind as I prepare to do this? Thanks in advance for any answers you give me and any time you've wasted reading this,
~DarthDavid~

The only question I might be able to answer is your first one, but for that I'll have to know which Linux distribution you're using and whether you use LILO or GRUB as your boot manager.

As for Firefox- symlink your Linux bookmark to the Windows one, and make that writable by using Captive (which also means you don't need shared).

I'm using debian and my boot loader is grub. Thanks for the symlink tip, lot easier than any of the potential Ideas I was tossing around in my head.

Use a LiveCD of some sort to boot into Linux after installing Windows, and then run Grub. At the Grub prompt, type "root <partition where your /boot directory is located>". Unfortunately, Grub has a bit of a weird syntax for specifying partitions. Instead of doing it the normal Linux way by using "hd<letter><number>" (such as hda1) is uses "(hd<number>,<number>)" with both numbers starting at zero. Thus, the partition identified in Linux as hda1 would be called (hd0,0) in Grub, with hda2 being (hd0,1), hdb1 being (hd1,0) and so on.

Once you've got that in, type "setup <drive on which you want to set up the MBR>". This, again, uses a somewhat odd syntax, but it's basically the same as the previous one except without the second number (since it just refers to physical drives instead of partitions.) hda would be (hd0), hdb would be (hd1) and so forth.

Then type "quit" and you're done.

Here's a page that describes this procedure in more detail. It's from the Gentoo Linux installation handboox, but it should apply to any distro using Grub.

Of course, Debian may provide a utility to do this automatically, which would probably be considerably easier than the method I just showed you, but I haven't used Debian in a few years (and it was using LILO at the time) so I'm not sure about the specifics.