On Friday 02 May 2008, Mark Knecht wrote: > My Windows Vista laptop ate the big one from M$ and died under the > weight of Windows Update. The hardware seems to check out fine > overnight so I'm going to finally do dual boot on this machine like I > wanted to when I bought it. > > Data: > > 80GB hard drive > 2GB DRAM > > Questions: > > 1) What's the recommended order to install dual boot today. I prefer > to go Gentoo first, XP second. Any issues?
All of this is mostly my own viewpoint from experience. There may be other ways: Other way round. Windows operating systems have a nasty habit of assuming they are the only system on the machine and merrily trash everything in sight for their own nefarious purposes. Then they overwrite any existing bootloader. I do this: Install XP. If you can get it to limit the partition size it uses, so much the better Resize windows partition downwards with Linux LiveCD. Most recent ones support this. Install Linux and set up a chainloader as normal in grub to boot windows Finally boot Windows and let it do what it wants with the partitions that need checking. This is expected behaviour caused by the downward resize > 2) What recommendations do folks have about splitting an 80GB drive > up. I'm thinking of maybe 50-60GB for Gentoo, followed by Win XP > using 20-30GB at the end of the drive. Partitions? I'm considering: > > sda1 -> /boot = 50MB > sda2 -> swap (unsure whether I should dedicate 4GB to this. That's 5% > of my drive and I won't likely ever use all of 2GB or RAM.) > sda3 -> /var = 2GB > sda4 ==extended > sda5 -> / balance of Linux side, say 55GB > sda6 == Windows drive C: Again, you have to take account of windows brain-deadedness and the even greater braindeadedness of windows "administrators". They don't expect boot partitions.... I would allocate as little as possible for windows itself. Say 10G, which allows for the OS plus it's virtual memory file plus other cache stuff From sda2 onwards, lay out your partitions as for a regular Linux installation. Use your own preferences for swap, lvm, filesystems etc. Being able to share data between both OSes is useful, so leave the most space possible for data: You have two options: FAT32. This is gross and gives you no security. It's also the easiest as both OSes support it out the box. Ext3/ReiserFS: Better solution security-wise but requires some setup. You have to download and install windows drivers from sourceforge. There's a third option - use the ntfs-ng driver in Linux. It seems just silly to use this for your main data storage though. -- Alan McKinnon alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com -- [email protected] mailing list
