Before I go and destroy my windows partition[solved]

[o'bogamol]

I'd like to dual boot. Vista and Gentoo. I'll use grub as my bootloader.

fdisk /dev/sda
<then I did a bunch of stuff>
: p

Device..........Boot..........Start..........End..........Blocks..........Id..........System
/dev/sda1........*..............1................5............40131.........83...........Linux <--This will be my boot partition
/dev/sda2........*..........12749..........38914........210G...........7............NTFS/HPFS <--This is currently my vista partiton
/dev/sda3 blah blah blah 82 swap
/dev/sda4 blah blah blah 83 Linux Filesystem

My question is, should I change /dev/sda2 to be not a bootable drive?

: t
2

: w

[/carlito]

I don't think you should change the boot flag of the vista partition as windows doesn't like this...

Personally I would have left vista as sda1 as when you need to reinstall it you might run into problems.
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.O.
..O
OOO

[NeddySeagoon]

bogamol,

Nope. You will still be able to boot into Windows and Windows will change the bootable flag on its partition.

The bootable flag is really something for the BIOS, although BIOSes vary.
Some don't check it at all,
Some check that its set on exaclty one partition, or the BIOS will flag a missing OS error.
Some check that its set on at least one partition, or the BIOS will flag a missing OS error.

Linux doesn't care, so if it works, leave it alone.
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

[o'bogamol]