Looking for Help

[Guest arothian]

Hey, i just bought a 80 GIG HD and will be sticking windows XP, and mandrake on it. I was wondering if anyone had some ideas on how to best partion it, and install the OS's for the best preformence.

Thanx

[Cannonfodder]

If you have 2 hard drives then better to install win on one and linux on the other. Mainly because then you don't have to handle the differences between extended partition as defined by XP and Linux and also don't have to worry about XP disk utilities messing with Linux.

 

But if you must do both on one, I would

 

1. Install XP into a primary. Just enough space to support it plus some. E.g. 4 gig.

 

2. Allocate the rest of the drive as an extended (using XP's disk utility or fdisk)

 

3. Install linux into the extended partitions.

 

4. Make a fat32 (vfat) partition for sharing.

[Counterspy]

I would like to add a few things for your consideration. There are sections on partitioning in the old docs at the top of the board screen. Next, so you understand what is going on, get hold of the Large Disk How-To and the Partitioning mini How-To at http://www.tldp.org , a place you will be visiting often as you delve into Linux.

 

Regardless of whether you use the 80 Gb disk or whether you decide to do both, you should consider creating a minimum of three partitions, "/" root, swap and "/home". With the space you have you could consider a "/usr" partition and if you want to run a server a "/var" partition as well. The reasoning behind the /home partition is that this is where all your custom settings for things like desktops and internet browsers, which you would not format again doing an upgrade or a hopefully unnecessary reinstall preserving your settings. /usr is where your chosen programs will be installed and /var is where the server database is installed. You should choose expert install to gain this much control over partitioning.

 

Counterspy