Dual-booting with Windows - general info

[Erick Brunzell]

I'll grant you that dual-booting with Windows up through XP was fairly
easy, but even about 20% of puters that shipped with Vista used 4
primary partitions by default.

That increased to about 80% with Win 7, and while it's still possible
it's definitely problematic.

I've only seen a few Win 8 puters but they've all used 4 primary
partitions by default ............. that makes installing Linux in a
dual-boot almost impossible!

I'll grant you that it is possible but quite often one of the primary
partitions is a data partition that can be copied to an external drive
and then copied back to an extended/logical partition, but it's quite a
technical project, and if the user restores Windows using the installed
restoration partition they'll lose all of the data in their Linux
install!!!!!!!

IMHO it's just not reasonable to give any advice on dual-booting with
Windows 7 or Windows 8, but if I did give any advice the first step
would be to say, "Use Windows own disk utility and see how many primary
partitions exist, if there are 4 just forget about it and consider a VM"!

Just my opinion,

Lance