I work on Windows7 myself, I put a CentOS 6.7 virtual machine and noticed one point when choosing a partition for the axis: move the old system and make another partition. Those. I understand correctly that if I have one logical disk with a Windows on which 100 GB is free, then I can allocate 50 of these 100, create a new partition, and in the end I will have two logical disks, one with W7, the other with CentOS and I can boot to any system? Do I need to pre-defragment? Will I need to do something with the boot records (for how to make it so that when loading I was asked which axis to load I do not know)?

  • This can be done. If Linux is installed second, then the boot sector does not need to be corrected. - 2ray
  • Do I need to defragment? I mean if I have one physical disk with 1 logical partition on which files are scattered randomly (well, that is, on different cylinders and sectors), do I need to somehow move them into a handful? Or, when partitioned into logical partitions, does it matter? - hunter

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if placed in a virtual machine, the download can only be from a virtual machine. Capturing the physical section does not say anything, and is not needed, by and large. If you allocate a piece of disk under the physical partition, then of course it is better to defragment a section that will be reduced to avoid data loss.

  • Not, no, not meant to put on a virtual machine, but on a physical machine. I just first put it on a virtual machine under W7, and then I started thinking about putting W7 and CentOS on my computer at the same time. The problem is that under Windows I have quite a lot of programs I need, and the work there is more or less stable. I do not want to create problems myself - if something goes wrong and I have to format the disk and install the system again. - hunter
  • then just defragment the disk, move the partition with some kind of auronis or clonezilla, allocating space and that's it. After installation there will be 2 systems, with a request at boot, which one to load. I'm worth it - maint