[vox-tech] a few pre-install questions

[dylan]

Hello everyone,

I am in the process of setting up a new machine for the lab- and am trying
to make the dual boot process as smooth as possible.

1. the machine currently has a single SATA hard disk that i would like to
use for both winXP (yuck!) and linux.

my initial plan for the drive would look something like this
partition #   usage
1             /boot  (ext2 format?)
2             /swap
3             windows_system (ntfs format)
4             my_windows_data (fat32 format ?) [needs to be rw in both OS's]
5             my_linux_data (ReiserFS format ?)
6             linux_system_stuff (ReiserFS format ?)

as i am mostly a linuxPPC type I do not have much experience with the
limitations and or quirks of BIOS limits on partition size and layout.

I have been traditionally using Debian stable for my linux needs, but since
I have been running into problems with bleeding edge hardware and software,
I was thinking about switching to SUSE 9.1 for this machine. (i won't give
up on Debian for older machines!) Anyone else on the list using SUSE 9.1 ? I
have installed it on 2 machines so far and it seems pretty nice so far.

any ideas on how to best set this up? Also is there a good format that both
linux and windows can use RW? all i could think of was fat32... how mature
is RW support for NTFF?


thanks in advance!!

Dylan