Ubuntu-accessibility Digest, Vol 56, Issue 6

[Maurice McCarthy]

I've inspected a laptop with Windows 7 installed from DVD using a grml
live CD. (http://grml.org is an administrator's distro with masses of
text based tools. As it supports speak-up, as early as possible in the
boot process, this makes it excellent for the visually impaired who
want to learn system administration. But the learning curve is steep!)

The laptop has two partitions. The boot partition is first. It begins
at sector 2048 and is 105MB in size and is 25% used. The remainder of
the 120GB disk is C: drive. The bare installation used 6GB on this
drive.

If you are not using Windows much then I'd install that first. It may
allow you to limit the amount of disk used or else or installing vinux
you can easily resize the 2nd partition to make space. 100 GB should
be plenty.

The partition system is inherited from MSDOS and linux used the same
partitioning so that dual booting could be achieved. Linux partitions
start at sector 63 so I can only guess that Windows is putting a lot
of boot code into sectors 1-2047. Sector 0 is the master boot record
or mbr and it contains the partition table.

Installing Vinux second will overwrite some this with grub2 unless you
install grub into the Vinux partition instead of the beginning of the
disc. They have to chain the windows boot loader to Vinux. Google for
EasyBCD for a windows solution to this.

Good Luck