[vox-tech] a few pre-install questions

[Ken Bloom]

On Mon, Aug 23, 2004 at 09:29:16PM -0700, 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.

Use a 2.6 kernel for SATA. Although I think some recent 2.4 kernels
work too. The Debian Sarge installer release candidates
(www.debian.org/debian-installer/) should work.

> 
> 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.

The first three will be "primary partitions" /dev/hda1 /dev/hda2
/dev/hda3.

the rest will be "logical partitions" /dev/hda5 /dev/hda6 /dev/hda7
and so forth.

/dev/hda4 will be a "extended partition", and will be created
automatically when you create the first logical partition. Its purpose
is to contain the logical partitions because AIUI, the BIOS can only
refer to 4 partitions.

I think windows needs to be on a primary partition, and its "active"
or "bootable" flag needs to be set. You don't even need this flag set
on /boot - it's a flag used by the Windows bootloader, I believe.

The bootloader gets installed to the master boot record, the first 400
or so bytes of /dev/hda. The installer should handle that for you. Use
GRUB as your bootloader, and you won't have to deal with installing it
again. (Be sure to install Windows first, or you will have to deal
with installing the bootloader again)

> 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.

You might try out Debian Sarge -- it's going to become the new stable
really soon.

> 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 NTFS?

There is RW support for NTFS using the Captive driver, which loads up
the Windows driver and uses that to support NTFS. I don't recommend
going this route unless you have to. Use fat32 instead. For the mount
command, it's name is vfat.

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