Currently, I have a 80 gig hard drive which is used completely by
Windows. I'll be buying another 80 gig hard drive to install and learn
Linux with. Just wondering:
1. How to partition drives; I would like to install SuSE 9.1
Professional, Mandrake 10.1, and Fedora Core 2 all on this harddrive,
anything I should be aware of partion-wise?
2. In the future, I'd like to get a 250 gig hard drive to store data
that can be accessed by both Linux and Windows. Currently, all I know
is that I would have to format that drive as a FAT32 partition, but are
there any considerations I should take when installing the Linux
distros on the 80 gig?

I don't mind reformating multiple times, but I do find it a waste of
time. Also, this is a family computer, otherwise I would reformat and
repartition the Windows drive; don't want to lose any of my parents
documents and such. Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks for your
time

On 30 May 2005 10:02:04 -0700, Vijay Korapaty wrote:
> Currently, I have a 80 gig hard drive which is used completely by
> Windows. I'll be buying another 80 gig hard drive to install and learn
> Linux with. Just wondering:
> 1. How to partition drives; I would like to install SuSE 9.1
> Professional, Mandrake 10.1, and Fedora Core 2 all on this harddrive,
> anything I should be aware of partion-wise?


Please bookmark the following, very large,
Frequently Asked Questions (faq) Search engine:

http://groups.google.com/advanced_group_search
search_tag_partition_layout in the first box
*linux* in Newsgroup box. You need to use the two
asterisks around linux, pick English


> 2. In the future, I'd like to get a 250 gig hard drive to store data
> that can be accessed by both Linux and Windows.

explain accessed. there is a winders program, Explore2fs, which can
read linux's ext2.

Want to read/write then fat32 is correct format.

Hi there..

My experience with dual-boot config partitions tells me that you should
install the new hard-drive and make known to windows first. Then carry
on with Linux installation.

For installation multiple Linuxes, there are recommendations for each
linux flavour. You'll have to delve into each documentation.

Onething noteworthy is that some newer BIOS allow choices of drives to
boot from. So if your BIOS supports this feature, you can disable your
windows hdd while installing linux and after, you can choose from boot
menu between linux and windows.

Best fo luck.

Vijay Korapaty wrote:
> Currently, I have a 80 gig hard drive which is used completely by
> Windows. I'll be buying another 80 gig hard drive to install and learn
> Linux with. Just wondering:
> 1. How to partition drives; I would like to install SuSE 9.1
> Professional, Mandrake 10.1, and Fedora Core 2 all on this harddrive,
> anything I should be aware of partion-wise?
> 2. In the future, I'd like to get a 250 gig hard drive to store data
> that can be accessed by both Linux and Windows. Currently, all I know
> is that I would have to format that drive as a FAT32 partition, but are
> there any considerations I should take when installing the Linux
> distros on the 80 gig?
>
> I don't mind reformating multiple times, but I do find it a waste of
> time. Also, this is a family computer, otherwise I would reformat and
> repartition the Windows drive; don't want to lose any of my parents
> documents and such. Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks for your
> time
>

I am no expert, but this is what I have done. I have WindowsXP
installed on my first hard drive. I used Partition Magic to create a
primary partition for a PCLinuxOS installation and a swap partition
following the WinXP partition. When I installed PCLinuxOS, I installed
Lilo to the hard drive MBR. Everything worked perfectly. Then when I
want to try another Linux distro, I use Partition Magix in WinXP to
create a logical partition following the last Linux partition. When
you install another distro, install Lilo or Grub to that partition,
not the MBR. Then after the installation is finished, boot into
PCLinuxOS, find the new lilo.conf and use it as a guide to edit the
PCLinux lilo.conf. I have five linux distros and WinXP on my system. I
have added and deleted partitions using Partition Magic with no
problems. You don't need to use PCLinuxOS as the first Linux, just one
that is stable and that you don't want to do a lot of experimentation on.

If you want to use a second hard drive, you could use the same
procedure, just make your Linux partitions on the second hard drive. I
would still put Lilo of the first Linux installation in the MBR of the
first hard drive.

Good luck, jimbo

"Vijay Korapaty" <zgamer00@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:1117472524.731039.106440@g47g2000cwa.googlegr oups.com...
> Currently, I have a 80 gig hard drive which is used completely by
> Windows. I'll be buying another 80 gig hard drive to install and learn
> Linux with. Just wondering:
> 1. How to partition drives; I would like to install SuSE 9.1
> Professional, Mandrake 10.1, and Fedora Core 2 all on this harddrive,
> anything I should be aware of partion-wise?

This is not a dual boot. This is a quad boot, and SuSE 9.1 and Fedora Core 2
at least are now considered deprecated. Go to SuSE 9.3 and FC3, or maybe FC4
when it comes out iin a week or so, if you can spend the time grabbing newer
CD's or DVD's.

Managing all the OS's is a bit of an adventure. You should think carefully
about which OS will be running the grub or MBR, and there are some
fascinating issues with that master grub needing a copy of other kernels
from the other distributions in its /boot directory to make things work
correctly that I've run into in the past.

Decide in advance whether to have a shared or distinct /boot's for each OS.
You should be able to use the same swap space for all of them, but I'd
recommend keeping your partitioning simple. You need a "/", possibly
including /boot, for each OS, and you may want to share the /home directory.

For sharing with Windows, I recommend a FAT32 partition. Windows doesn't
read ext2 or other Linux file systems well, and Linux can't safely write to
NTFS partitions, but both speak FAT32 quite well.

"Vijay Korapaty" <zgamer00@gmail.com> writes:

>Currently, I have a 80 gig hard drive which is used completely by
>Windows. I'll be buying another 80 gig hard drive to install and learn
>Linux with. Just wondering:
>1. How to partition drives; I would like to install SuSE 9.1
>Professional, Mandrake 10.1, and Fedora Core 2 all on this harddrive,
>anything I should be aware of partion-wise?

Make three partitions of 5GB each for the various distros. On the rest put
things like /home and /usr/local which can be shared between distributions.


>2. In the future, I'd like to get a 250 gig hard drive to store data
>that can be accessed by both Linux and Windows. Currently, all I know
>is that I would have to format that drive as a FAT32 partition, but are
>there any considerations I should take when installing the Linux
>distros on the 80 gig?

No.

"elanore" <kntchbll@yahoo.com> writes:

>Hi there..

>My experience with dual-boot config partitions tells me that you should
>install the new hard-drive and make known to windows first. Then carry
>on with Linux installation.

>For installation multiple Linuxes, there are recommendations for each
>linux flavour. You'll have to delve into each documentation.

>Onething noteworthy is that some newer BIOS allow choices of drives to
>boot from. So if your BIOS supports this feature, you can disable your
>windows hdd while installing linux and after, you can choose from boot
>menu between linux and windows.

While, on the belts and suspenders theory of safety, this may be a good
idea, it is not necessary. Linux does nothing to windows. However if y ou
reinstall windows, it will erase y our linux bootloader and prevent access
to Linux.


>Best fo luck.

Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote:
> "Vijay Korapaty" <zgamer00@gmail.com> wrote in message
> news:1117472524.731039.106440@g47g2000cwa.googlegr oups.com...
>
>>Currently, I have a 80 gig hard drive which is used completely by
>>Windows. I'll be buying another 80 gig hard drive to install and learn
>>Linux with. Just wondering:
>>1. How to partition drives; I would like to install SuSE 9.1
>>Professional, Mandrake 10.1, and Fedora Core 2 all on this harddrive,
>>anything I should be aware of partion-wise?
>
>
> This is not a dual boot. This is a quad boot, and SuSE 9.1 and Fedora Core 2
> at least are now considered deprecated. Go to SuSE 9.3 and FC3, or maybe FC4
> when it comes out iin a week or so, if you can spend the time grabbing newer
> CD's or DVD's.
>
> Managing all the OS's is a bit of an adventure. You should think carefully
> about which OS will be running the grub or MBR, and there are some
> fascinating issues with that master grub needing a copy of other kernels
> from the other distributions in its /boot directory to make things work
> correctly that I've run into in the past.
>
> Decide in advance whether to have a shared or distinct /boot's for each OS.
> You should be able to use the same swap space for all of them, but I'd
> recommend keeping your partitioning simple. You need a "/", possibly
> including /boot, for each OS, and you may want to share the /home directory.
>
> For sharing with Windows, I recommend a FAT32 partition. Windows doesn't
> read ext2 or other Linux file systems well, and Linux can't safely write to
> NTFS partitions, but both speak FAT32 quite well.
>
>

You don't need a copy of the other distos' kernels in the /boot
directory of the "master" linux installation. In Lilo all you have to
do is to refer to the correct location for the kernal, such as:

"image=/mnt/hda5/boot/vmlinuz"

This points Lilo to the correct kernel. And then a line to define the
root directory: "root=/dev/hda5".

WinXP reads Linux ext2 and ext3 files with no problems, however, you
should not write to a WinXP NTFS partition from a Linux OS. (I haven't
tried reading any other Linux file type from WinXP.)

jimbo

Thanks for the responses. After installing SuSE 9.1 Professional on the
second hard drive and getting it up and running, I think I'm content
with that for now. Perhaps later on, when I'm a fair bit more familiar
with whatever the heck I'm doing, I'll be daring and split my Linux
hard drive in a multitude of partitions and try out Gentoo and
Slackware as well.

Thanks again all!

Oh, and originally, I meant a partition to which both Windows and Linux
could read/write. FAT32 can take care of that in future days.