Installing Eucalyptus with Windows 8 in a Dual Boot Environment

Eucalyptus is based on CentOS, which is common with most Linux distributions. If you want to test out or learn Eucalyptus without losing your current Windows operating system, you can opt for dual-booting. With dual booting, you will get the option of booting your system with either Eucalyptus or Windows. Obviously you can only run one operating system at a time in such a configuration, but it is worth noting that the files on the Windows partition of your disk drive will be safe.

Partition Resizing

This installation method involves shrinking the size of the existing Windows partition to accommodate the installation of Eucalyptus.

Step 1: In order to accommodate the space on the disk drive for Eucalyptus, right click on My Computer > Manage > Disk Management to display a graphical representation of the disk drives in your system.

Step 2: Right click on the partition you wish to reduce and select Shrink Volume. The tool will calculate the maximum amount by which the volume may be reduced without any data loss (a process that can take several minutes depending on the overall size of the partition). Once this analysis is complete, a dialog similar to the one in the following figure will appear.

Step 3: You can manually enter how much space you want to shrink. In the figure, we have shrunk 80 GB for the installation of Eucalyptus. Now, restart your computer and boot it with Eucalyptus DVD.

Installation of Eucalyptus

Step 1: Boot your system with Eucalyptus bootable DVD by opening your system boot menu (Press F12 or 11, most common button to open boot menu) and selecting your DVD drive. You will see different options of installing cloud on the screen. Select option 3 cloud-in-box as shown in the following screenshot.

Step 2: In this step, the setup will ask you to run media test, just skip this step and configure different options like language and keyboard settings.

Step 3: Configure the Network settings manually. Select Static mode, if you select DHCP and if the address changes after installation, the OS won’t work smoothly.

Step 4: Now, select the mode of installation on the hard drive. Select option 5 Create Custom Layout and click on Next.

Step 5: Select the partition that you created in Windows 8 for Eucalyptus. In the following screenshot, you can see the free space of 80 GB which was created by us in step 1.

Step 6: Now double click on the free partition and it will pop-up to create an additional partition. Create Swap partition of 2GB.

Raj Kumar Maurya | Pcquest

Step 7: After creating Swap partition, again double click on the free space and create boot partition of 400 MB as shown in the screenshot.

 

Step 8: Once you create Swap and boot partitions, then allow rest of the space to root. For doing this, select the free space and click on the Create option, select Standard Volume option. A window will pop-up in which you have to select Mount point to / from drop down list and from Additional size option, select the third option Fixed to maximum allowable size as shown in the screenshot.

Step 9: If all the partitions are created successfully, then click Next and you will see a screen that will ask you which operating system boot loader will show operating system list. Leave it as it is and click on Next.

Step 10: When the installation is complete, reboot it. You will be asked to press any key to see other boot options. Press any key and you will get a screen as shown in the screenshot where you will get two options - Eucalyptus and other. The other is Windows 8 operating system. All these steps are also applicable when you want to dual boot any Linux OS with any Windows OS version i.e. 7, 8 or 10.