I finally got tired of scrounging for disk space, and bought a new hard drive for my laptop. Now, I'm puzzling over how to partition it. My current drive has separate partitions for Microsoft Windows (which I only admit to here out of sense of honestly, but I do occasionally need it for work), swap, /, and /home. As I recall, this arrangement was adopted in ancient times (oh, two or three years ago), and may not have been the best choice even then.
First Question: What's the current 'best practice', partition-wise, for a new GNU/Linux install? The whole boot process is pretty much a dark art to me. I'd like to copy my Microsoft Windows partition to the new disk with minimal fuss, but I don't know how to do that in a way that ensures it will still boot. I'll use GRUB (with GNU/Linux as the default, of course), but will that take care of it for me, or is there some mysterious hidden data expected in a particular disk location? Question the Second: How can I copy the contents of my Microsoft Windows partition to a new disk, and still be able to boot from it? Will a straight file copy do the trick? Finally, I'm planning to switch from plain Ubuntu to XUbuntu, having gotten it into my head that it will be faster, cleaner, and lead to improved health and happiness. I'll want most of the same stuff from my old system, which leads to Question Number 'C': How can I (with minimal pain) create a download script for my new system, to install all the packages I had on my old system? (I want a download script so I can use the broadband connection on another machine) Thanks for sharing your wisdom, Mike ********************************************************************** This electronic message together with any attachments is confidential. If you receive it in error: (i) you must not use, disclose, copy or retain it; (ii) please contact the sender immediately by reply email and then delete the emails. Views expressed in this email may not be those of the Airways Corporation of New Zealand Limited **********************************************************************
