I just put together a brand-new box: asus A7V333 mobo, 40Gb Maxtor HD, AMD XP2000+, blah blah. I installed win2000. I only had experience with win 3.1, 95 & 98, never used win2k.

Anyway, I thought win2k gave you an option during install to use Fat32 or ntfs. I wanted to have fat32, but the only option during install was ntfs, so I did it that way.

So now I have a fresh install of win2k with ntfs. I now want to put mandrake 9.0 on half of the drive. I own Partition Magic 7.0, although I have never used it.

Is this what I should do: install pm 7.0 and shrink the 40Gb windoze partition to 20Gb, and partition the other 20Gb as Ext2? Will the mandrake 9.0 install then make all of its necessary partitions just on the Ext2 part of my HD?
Do I want my entire linux 20GB to be ext2, or do I want one of the newer fs's? (reiser)

Thanks

The best bet would have been to partition the drive with the w2k install, and left the rest of the drive blank for linux. ntfs is not friendly to linux, and another thread is dealing with how linux botched an ntfs partition. If possible, reinstall w2k, and set up the ntfs partition for half the drive now.

I didn't realize I could just partition half of the drive during the initial install of win2k. You're right, that would have been the best way.

I decided to just leave my new high-end system as a win2k only machine.

My former box (PIII-1Ghz, 256Mb RAM, 40Gb HD) is a dual-boot with win98 & mandrake 9.0. I think I will just make my former box ALL mandrake 9.0, and get rid of the win98 (I HATE win98).

So the NEW question is, on my dual-boot win98 & mdk 9.0, can I easily make it ALL 9.0, without harming the current install of 9.0 (I have the nvidia 3D drivers and some other stuff already working right - don't wanna hurt that). Also, I wouldn't need the LILO anymore.

Sorry, but I'm a total noob on partitioning & stuff. I've been dual-booting about a year with mandrake & win98. Tired of it.
I think I will be happier with an all win2k box, and an all mandrake box. (now all I'll need is 2 flat-screen monitors to put on my desk!)

thanks

You could try using partition magic and just shink the windows partition down to nothing or just remove it all together. Format for ext2 or 3 and mount it as a linux partition. You could use it as a long turm storage area or a linux back up spot.

I administrated a network of Win2k computers for a while. It definately gave me the option of using a fat32 partition during install. Perhaps try getting hold of a newer release.

I would not recommend resizing a ntfs partition, unless you do not mind losing all the data on it. The actual size change will be fine, but data will most likely not make it.

When you installed win2k did you boot and install off the CD. If so, it should have asked you how you wanted to format your drive. Only once have I experienced an install where it has not asked me what type of file system I want, and up to this day I still have no idea why. because I used the same disk that I always use. But try again.

I used PM7 to shrink my NTFS drive a couple of times. The last time I did it, it screwed up everything and for that reason I have never used it again and I don't recommend using it.

Best bet is to reinstall and make you windows partition smaller and then leave an empty unformatted, unpartitioned space at the end. When you install MDK, you can then just put it into that empty space at the end of the drive. To be able to do all you wanna do leave about 10 gig free. I gave mine 6 gig and while it is plenty, if you wanna install games and stuff like that, it becomes very small...!!

I decided just to leave my new box as win2k only. I hate to say this on this board, but compared to win95/98 I actually like win2k.

I have mdk 9.0 on my other box working good. I would like to get rid of the win98 dual boot on that box.

I am gonna do what was suggested above - use PM 7.0 to reformat the fat32 win98 portion of my dual-boot box and make it ext2 so that linux can use it. After I reformat it as ext2, can I make my home dir bigger to take advantage of the new space?

One thing I'll mention regarding the original "ntfs" post, is that when I was buying everything for my new box, the computer store told me - "If you have a drive bigger than 30Gb, you will have no choice but to install ntfs". That's what they said when I mentioned I was gonna select "fat32" during install.
Since I didn't have any experience with win2k at the time, I didn't know if that was true or not. However, it was one of the computer technicians who said that to me.

Anyway, my older box - PIII-1Ghz, 256Mb RAM, 40Gb HD is still a good machine, and I'm looking forward to making it all mdk 9.0, if I can get rid of the 23GB that win98 is taking up (and get rid of LILO).

And then when within linux, make it ext3. Journalled filesystem, good-bye long fscks if the system crashed and such.

Yes. It may be done several different ways - either transfer all your old /home into the new partition and mount the new partition as /home, or mount your new partition somewhere under /home/your_user. E.g, /home/your_user/huge_partition_for_music. Or use some other way, whatever suits you better.

I'm not so sure that you can get rid of LILO. Linux needs some bootloader to boot up, period. Mandrake bundles LILO and GRUB as its bootloaders, and you may choose either one.
OTOH, you may configure LILO not to display prompt and boot Linux within some very short timeout.

When you scrap win98, plan your partitions for expansion. /usr and /home are two that need some room for play. So, let's say you want to expand /home from 4G to 10G. Make a 10G linux partition and have it move your /home data to the new partition. Now you have an empty 4G partition. Perhaps /root is only 2G. Now move /root.
Eventually you can expand your partitions without missing any data.
I would size the partitions, from largest to smallest:
/usr
/home
/root
/var
It just depends on how much room you have.

thanks for all the helpful comments. good to know I can come here to get anything answered.

I feel stupid about LILO, I didn't know it was a "normal" part of any linux install. I thought it was only for the dual-boot thing. If I use PM 7.0 to format my windoze98 half of my drive, is there another step needed to inform LILO not to offer windoze as a boot option anymore?

I will do all the things suggested above about re-sizing the linux partitions, thanks for all that.

You'll have to go and edit your LiLo config file but thats a simple thing. Once you find and open it in your editor just remove the lines refering to the windows partition. Then save the file.

Hi,
Have any of you tried repartioning an all ntfs drive with PM8 :?: According to them its supposed to have full ntfs support. If you have can you reply 8)

Thanx a bunch

Actually, you won't need PM at all. Just use the Linux fdisk, or use DiskDrake, to reallocate the Win98 partition to ext3. DiskDrake can easily handle a FAT/FAT32 partition -- it's the NTFS stuff that Linux has a hard time with.

For your mandrake box, do the expert install and when you get to the partitinging screen, just hit clear. It will clear the partitioning table (good idea).

Then hit auto-configure and select the /usr option. Now write down the partition info that it created on paper. You can note the

Name
Size
File System
Mount Point (where it get's mounted in the linux file system)

Consider any other partitions you would like to make such as /var.

Then hit clear again.

Now make each partition by hand. I suggest reiserfs as your linux file system rather than ext2 or 3. It's worked very well and is a journaled file system. Many users are swearing by it. All my linux partitions are reiserfs except the swap partition.

For the first partition / (boot/root), click Preferences and select Primary. For the remaining partitions, click Preferences and select Extended. This will leave you with the ability to make 2 more primaries down the road.

When you are done, you should have something like this..

hda1 - / - reiserfs
hda5 - /swap - swap
hda6 - /usr - reiserfs
hda7 - /home - reiserfs

You can also make additional partitions such as MEDIA or DEV (development), based on your needs.

The goal of making separate partitions is that the file systems will be quicker and also easier to backup. It's easy to backup a 2 gig partition vs a 20 gig partition. Easy to put them on CD's or copy to another hard drive.

Check out www.partimage.org for free ghosting software.


Another option is to put a second hard drive into your win2k computer and install linux on that hard drive. This will allow you to share files easily unless you want to network your computers and use samba to transfer files. If you put them on the same computer, then you should probably make a Fat32 partition for sharing files.

Regarding NTFS, you had the option if you installed from CD. It was the blue screen asking you to format. Win2k is a neat OS compared to the other ones. You will probably like it

I would recommend you redo your NTFS system. I would reinstall Win2k and make it about 2.5 gig in size. Get the system up and running with drivers and anything that doesn't expire (in terms of software such as virus software).

Then use the win2k Disk manager to create a new extended partition that takes up the rest of the drive. Within the extended partition you can make other partitions for various purposes (same ideas as with linux). I have a software partition, media partition, development so on. Never use the a windows disk manager or fdisk to modify a partition table with linux partitions, you will be sorry! Always use a linux disk manager instead.

At this point, use partimage or ghost to burn a copy of your NTFS partition and save it on CD so you can always restore it if it ever gets screwed or you simply want to go back to a clean install. Try to do as many customizations as possible before you burn it. Prefer a list view vs a folder icon view. Set it before burning the ghost.

Once this is done, you can install additional software, everthing you need. If you make a software partition, this will be D:. You can install everything to that.

I also right-clicked on my computer, select properties, advanced, environment variables and moved my temp folders to a different partition (such as D: or what not). This keeps my C: from filling up with junk after a while. Lastely I moved my swap to some other partition besides C:.