Has anyone done this? I have a Windows Vista Ultimate installation on a 250 GB disc which I can use it's disk manager to shrink to about 200GB. If I then install Fedora will it automatically give me an option to boot either operating system? Cheers

Has anyone done this? I have a Windows Vista Ultimate installation on a 250 GB disc which I can use it's disk manager to shrink to about 200GB. If I then install Fedora will it automatically give me an option to boot either operating system? Cheers

i don't know about Vista but under XP/2003/2000 when a dual OS was installed , just before OS booting a menu poped up to select which you wanted to boot into.

I have successfully done this with Vista and Fedora Core 8. It detects the install of Vista and allows you to dual boot with no problems.

I resized the disc to give 200GB to Windows Vista and 50GB spare and installed Fedora 8 without any issues.
However on boot I get the Grub screen with two options, Fedora or Other.
If I take Other it boots happily into Windows Vista but if Fedora it gives me:

Booting Fedora
root (hd0,1)
kernel /vmlinux-2.6-23-1.fc8 ro root=/dev/Volgroup00/LogVol00 rhgb quiet
Error 15: File not found

The Windows Vista disk managment tool shows the disc as:
Basic 232.88GB C: 178.29 NTFS 196MB Primary partition 58.40GB Primary partition

I have the option to manually alter the two Grub lines at boot:
root (hd0,1)
kernel /vmlinux-2.6-23-1.fc8 ro root=/dev/Volgroup00/LogVol00 rhgb quiet

so might it just be a matter of specifying a different partition? Cheers

You have two problems.

1. You are trying to manage your partitions with Vista. Don't bother. Ever. Resize your Vista NTFS partition with Vista by all means, but everything else should be done out of linux so that you can be sure of what it is telling you.

2. You have installed Fedora (DOH!) with the default partitioning layout which is to use a Logical Volume as the root partition. This is a BAD idea. It may seem good at times and Fedora may seem to like the idea enough to have made it the default but all it is going to do for YOU is cause problems.

Start again.

Leave whatever free space you want to for Fedora, using the Fedora installer, create one primary partition for Fedora after the Vista partition, but leave 4096MB free, then create a 4096MB swap partition after the Fedora root partition. Then install Fedora to the root partition and you'll be away.

Alternatively, install a decent linux distribution such as Slackware 12.0.

Did a reinstall manually partitioning an Ext2 and swap which completed fine but gave the same error message on boot.
The only other distribution I had to hand was Debian so tried that.
Perfect but kind of a shame as learnt on RH

It's not a shame at all. RH is guano. I've had to help two people out today because a RH update independantly broke each of their RT installs because RH make their own idiot decisions as to how perl should work.