[vox-tech] a few pre-install questions

[Rod Roark]

On Monday 23 August 2004 09:29 pm, dylan wrote:
> 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 ?)

In my experience Windows gets confused if it's not booting
from the first partition on the drive.  I would suggest
installing XP first and let it allocate the partitions that
you want for it.  Then when you later install Linux you can
allocate the remaining partitions.

ReiserFS is good, especially if you will have many small
files.  You don't really need a separate /boot partition, as
long as you put "lba32" in lilo.conf (am not sure what the
consideratins are for grub).

> 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.

I'm sure SuSE is fine but if bleeding edge is what you want,
consider Gentoo.

> 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?

NTFS?  Don't do it.  FAT32 is good for sharing stuff.

Good luck!

-- Rod
   http://www.sunsetsystems.com/

> thanks in advance!!
> 
> Dylan