4. Dual Booting CentOS 8 with Windows

CentOS 8, just like most Linux distributions, will happily co-exist on a hard disk drive with just about any version of Windows up to and including Windows 10. This is a concept known as dual-booting. Essentially, when you power up the system, you will be presented with a menu providing the option to boot either your CentOS 8 installation or Windows. Obviously you can only run one operating system at a time, but it is worth noting that the files on the Windows partition of your disk drive will be available to you from CentOS 8 regardless of whether your Windows partition was formatted using NTFS, FAT16 or FAT32.

This installation method involves shrinking the size of the existing Windows partitions and then installing CentOS 8 into the reclaimed space. This chapter will assume that CentOS 8 is being installed on a system currently running Windows 10.