laudire Posted October 2, 2004 Report Share Posted October 2, 2004 Hi everyone! I have a machine running Mdk 9.0 on the main hd (40 Gb) with 5 gb for / and 5 Gb for /home. I want to install Xandros and possibly SuSe also. Someone suggested on another forum that I need only one Swap and one /home partitions that will work with all distros. They also said that I can use Parted to resize the /home partition but that I should make sure it is unmounted. I am a newbee and am afraid to unmount it not knowing how to remount it after I have resized. What would you suggest I do. Your help will be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance, Réjean Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ixthusdan Posted October 2, 2004 Report Share Posted October 2, 2004 Having done this in the past, I would not have only one /home. The wm/de may use slightly different settings for each distro. While /home itself in a command line state is fine, the gui is something else. One swap is fine. What you can do is have a primary distro with a large /home and set up the others with a smaller /home, since only the settings for that distro are going to be stored there. This is what I have done. Any time you change a partition, you can lose data, period. Back-up your stuff before doing anything. In fact. I would recommend moving your data, resizing the partition, and then putting the data back. What is your drve(s) configuration currently? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
laudire Posted October 2, 2004 Author Report Share Posted October 2, 2004 Hi Ixthusdan! I like your suggestions. I think I'll give Xandros a larger /home partition and keep Mdk 9.0 just the way it is right now. I can access the net via Win XP on my main machine, I can see some of my files on XP also, being networked. Too bad I cannot see my Linux machine from the XP??? My current drives config are; /dev/hda1 Swap (249 Mb) /dev/hda5 / (2.9 Gb) /dev/hda6 /home (3.9 GB) .....the last 2 sizes maybe the space left. I'm not sure. I cannot access the machine right now........ with a second hd for Win 98 SE, something like /dev/hdc1 /mnt/windows (2.4 Gb) ....It's a 2.5 Gb hd anyhow. What do you think? Réjean Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ixthusdan Posted October 2, 2004 Report Share Posted October 2, 2004 If you have the space: make a 1G partition, say hda7, and call it /home. Then move your data to that partition. Now, you have 3.9G of space, which you could size into 2 partitions of around 2G each, which you could use for various distros. If you want your main distro to occupy adjacent space, you could make another partition for /, and then utilize the space at the front-end of the drive for other distros. Note: You will have to change your fstab to reflect the changes of locations, or you will not be able to boot! Use a "live" cd like MandrakeMove, MEPIS, or PCLinux OS to edit your /etc/fstab before you try to boot back into linux. If you move /, you will also have to check out /etc/lilo.conf or /boot/grub, whichever boot loader you are using. Summarize: moving partitions will present less risk to data, but you should note /etc/fstab and /etc/lilo.conf or /boot/grub for edits. Get a "live" cd. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
laudire Posted October 2, 2004 Author Report Share Posted October 2, 2004 Thanks Ixthusdan! I'll wait until I get the installations cds for Xandros and/or SuSe and will keep in mind what you suggested! Greatly appreciated! Réjean Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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