Dan LaBine wrote:
Richard Denton wrote:
This is interesting. I'm just in the process of setting my two hard
drives up (30 Gb and 80Gb) to dual boot winxp and Mandriva 2006.
It's a bit messy at the moment and I don't have a very clear idea of
what layout would be best. I'm thinking hda 10Gb winxp ntfs, 5 Gb /
ext3, 3 Gb swapext3, 12 Gb /home ext3
hdb 30 Gb fat 32, 30Gb fat32, 20 Gb ext3. At the moment the fat32
partitions are mounted under /mnt and the 20Gb ext2 on hdb is unmounted.
Where do you mount your fat32 partitions DL?
best regards,
Richard
Hi Richard. Of course, I can't know your thoughts on what you need and
how or for what reason, but in case you don't already know, you can
store any and all Linux packages, etc., on a FAT32 partition without
any problems and Linux can access them without any problems.
The only trick is to use the Expert mode of Diskdrake and click the
'Options' button. Once you're in options, DE-select all options and
you'll see a space where you can insert another option. In that line,
type this exactly: umask=0
FYI, That's the number 'Zero', not the letter 'O' as in OH.
That will give users full read/write access to the drive. You'll need
to reboot afterwards and then change the mount point permissions to
RWX for user, group and others. That will stop any issues about who
can use the drive.
You can still set permissions (In Linux) for folders on the FAT32
partition for individual users or groups, but setting the RWX
permissions on the whole drive first, will allow all users in Windows
AND Linux to create and secure any folders they want on their own.
Now, as to your question and layout. I see 2 Fat32 partitions of
30GB's each, which tells me that you probably formatted them in
WindowsXP. Microsoft didn't stop supporting larger FAT32 partitions,
they just made it impossible to format FAT32 partitions LARGER than 32
GB's. Again, I supply that info in case you didn't know.
So, to simplify your 80GB drive, you could reformat the whole thing to
FAT32 and use it as a storage drive for every single last shred of
important data, whether that data comes from Windows or from Linux and
that way, emails, documents, photos, downloads, MP3's and every other
type of file could be stored on it and accessed by any program in
Windows or in Linux - as long as you have the right software to use
those files.
The advantage to this is full file/older transportation from one OS to
the other. If you use Mozilla Thunderbird, you can create a profile in
it and tell Thunderbird to store the profile (which includes all your
account settings AND email) somewhere in the 80 GB drive, then tell
Thunderbird in the opposite OS to use that same profile. Just like
sharing documents between the 2 OS's, you can share the same emails,
address-books and account info between the 2 as well.
In fact, even though it's over the 32Gb limit set by Microsoft,
Windows will use it just fine and you can use the disk defragmenter in
Windows without any problems.
Now, down to the details,....
1) I'd set up the 30 GB drive as the primary drive (hda), and go with
a 15 GB partition in Windows XP (probably NTFS) on that drive. The
Windows partition needs to be the first partition on that drive. Linux
would see that partition as HDA1. Once Windows is installed, you can
increase the size of your Windows swap file (it's NOT a partition in
Windows,..it's a file called 'pagefile.sys') and that might even speed
things up under heavy loads.
2) Then, I'd go with a 7 to 8 GB partition on the same drive for '/'
(the root partition) which would become HDA5, then roughly 1.5 GB's
for the 'swap' partition (a.k.a. HDA6), followed by a 2 GB '/tmp'
partition (HDA7) and the balance of the 30 GB drive would become your
Linux '/home' partition sitting at HDA8.
When setting up the 80 GB drive, format it using Diskdrake and set the
mount point as '/Archive' or whatever you want to name it. I've been
setting up my systems like that for years without a single problem, so
I know it works.
Linux will not only format FAT32 partitions larger than 32 GB's, but
will also allow you to name them as you see fit. Windows will allow
you to name or 'label' partitions as well, so I typically give the
/Archive partition the same name in Windows, which will have already
assigned a drive letter to that 80 GB drive by the time you log into
Windows again.
Either way you go with this, format your Linux partitions using EXT3,
except for the swap partition which should be done in 'Linux Native'
format. EXT3 has better support for recovering one file without having
to recover the whole drive like you would have to do in ReiserFS and
the new ReiserFS 4 is too new to depend on.
But,.....that's just me.
Once that FAT32 partition is all ready to go, you can add folders for
each user (which will work in Linux and/or Windows) and re-point your
'My Documents' folder into those user folders. You can also tell
Microsoft Office where to find that folder on a per user basis and you
can tell KDE as well as Open Office to use the same folder in Linux as
well.
Good Luck and HTH's.
DL
Many thanks Dan for your very full reply. Lots I didn't know.
It will be a day or two before I'm able to tackle that problem again and
I'm sure to have a couple more questions when I get there.
Best regards,
Richard
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