Hi all, I still haven't had time to set up my Aspire One with Mepis 8.0, but incremental progress is being made. I booted Mepis from CD and used GPartEd to resize the XP partition from 146Gb to 12Gb, and I want to install Mepis on the space I a freed up. The resize worked, so now I have about 132Gb for Linux.
On the hard drive there are two partitions. The first is hidden, and it's a 4Gb 'recovery' image to restore the laptop to factory condition. The second is the 'real' XP partition (now 12Gb). The Mepis installation instructions recommend creating three partitions for Mepis (unless you are using the automatic install and wiping the whole drive). The recommendation is a 5-10Gb partition for root (I will choose 10Gb), a swap partition equal to twice the installed RAM, but no more than 1Gb (so in my case it will be 1Gb), and the rest as /home (about 120Gb for me). Since I already have two primary partitions, and I can only have four in total, how should I configure the three partitions for Mepis? I need some combination of primary and extended partitions. Once I have created the partitions Mepis will set itself up properly when I tell it what partitions to use. After that it will install GRUB. Shall I install GRUB to the MBR, or to the root partition? Clearly I have never set up a dual-boot system before. Mostly because I don't want one. However, in this case I want to use Linux, but I don't want to lose XP, nor do I want to lose the factory restore function in case the laptop needs to be serviced under warranty. Advice gratefully received, Andrew (Yes, I have Googled it, but I don't understand the consequences of making a wrong partition choice, or GRUB installation choice. I could learn from experience... but I'd rather learn from someone else's mistakes :) Oh, and I'm in Korea with very little gear and no internet connection at home.)
