Dual-boot Pear Linux 5 and Windows 7 on a PC with 2 hard drives

The first partition you want to add is going to be mounted at /boot. This is the boot partition. On a new installation of Pear Linux 5, /boot takes up about 51 MB of disk space, but to make allowance for growth that comes with system upgrades, be generous here. A size of 500 MB is the default on most Linux distributions. The default file system is Ext4. Unless you know what you are doing, there is no reason to choose any other. OK.

The second partition will be the root partition. The recommended disk space for installing Pear Linux 5 is 5.7 GB, which is more than enough, since a new installation takes uses about 3.4 GB. Because resizing a non-LVM disk partition is not a trivial matter, be generous with disk allocation here, too. Be sure to select / as the mount point, and stick with the default file system type. OK.

For the partition where your home directory will be located, allocate as much disk space as you can afford. Do not skimp on disk space here. More is better. For the mount point, be sure to select /home. OK.

Finally, the Swap partition. For guidance on how much disk space to allocate to it, see the answer to a question at the Forum. About 4 GB should be enough for most desktop systems. Select swap area from the Use as dropdown menu, then click OK.

That should bring you back to the main disk partitioning window, where all the partitions you just created should be listed. Before clicking Install Now, you want to make sure that the Device for boot loader installation is /dev/sdb. Else the installer will be overwriting Windows’ boot programs in the Master Boot Record of sda.

Towards the end of the installation process, the installer will give you the option to import your data from Windows. Your call.

After installation, reboot. Now, do you want to change the default boot device in the BIOS or do you want to install a program that will make it easy to add an entry for Pear Linux 5 in Windows’ boot menu? If your choice is the former, press the Delete button as the computer is booting. That should put in the BIOS setup.

If you choose the second method, the best graphical application for doing it, is EasyBCD, which you may download from here. Follow the instructions in this article.