Setting Up Dual Boot - Already have Grub/SuSE

[iDevin]

Howdy,

I just downloaded 2004.1 universal livecd for the x86 at the office today (they've got the broadband that I lack at home) and I started reading the install guide when I got home. There didn't seem to be any information about dual booting with Windows. It's pretty important that I keep my copy of windows on there. I currently have a SuSE installation on there but it (A) refuses to get past the login screen any more and (B) annoys me just because of it's SuSEness. Anyways, I've heard nothing but good things about Gentoo so I thought I'd give it a whirl.

Also, I'd like to keep the partitions I've got if possible. I'll put in my hard drive formatting layout, but it's just the info from Disk Management in WinXP so I can't remember if that little 15MB partition is grub. Anyways here goes (* means WinXP says it's a Healthy Unkown Partition):

Disk 0 (Primary Disk/Windows Disk):
HDA0/C: 14.64GB NTFS (Windows XP Professional)
HDA1/D: 3.99GB FAT32 (Compaq Recovery Data)

Disk 1 (Secondary Disk/Documents Disk/Linux Disk):
HDB0/F: 13.95GB FAT32 (Documents/Music etc.)
HDB1/*: 15MB (Grub?)
HDB2/*: 391MB (I'm fairly certain this is the swap partition)
HDB3/*: 4.30GB (Linux, currently holding the evil SuSE)

I figured the order of the unkown partitions due to the order in which Disk Management listed them.

Anyways, I've got grub on there now and it's configured to boot to XP as default after 7 seconds or thereabouts and it can also boot to SuSE, though SuSE has it's own problems - hence the move to gentoo. It works pretty flawlessly.

What I'm getting at here is, what do I do during install (going for a stage 3) to make it so that I don't have to do any reformatting or repartitioning, so that I can boot to Windows XP, and use my SuSE partitions to install Gentoo on. The guide covers similar issues but I was wondering if anyone else has tried this so that I can get some exact info on my scenario before I go buggering it up lol.

Enough of my rambling, anyways, if you need any more information just let me know and thank you VERY much for helping me out.

-Devin

[barlad]

There is no problem here. You can safely follow the installation guide.
Just make sure your format the right partitions. You won't have to partition disk1 again but you will have to format HDB2 and HDB3 to install Gentoo. I would reformat HDB1 too and make a clean grub install but that's not necessary at all. Just make sure you copy the right files in your boot partition (i.e - your gentoo kernel,...)

Do not touch the rest.

Have fun with the installation!

[iDevin]

Excellent! Just the news I was hoping for.

I'm going to give this a go tonight after school.

Thanks for your help!