[vox-tech] Thank you! -- Dual-boot partition scheme

[Margo Schulter]

Hello, there, everyone, and this is a quick report to thank everyone
who helped me with my disk partitioning and dual boot questions this
summer, and to document my solution, much informed by your
suggestions.

First, here's the output from fdisk -l to show one approach to the
not-always-so-tidy question of how to boot MS-DOS 6.22 and one or more
Linuxes (or Linuces?) on a single disk:

Disk /dev/hda: 40.0 GB, 40020664320 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 4865 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hda1   *           1          33      265041    6  FAT16
/dev/hda2              34         950     7365802+   5  Extended
/dev/hda3             917        2161    10000462+  83  Linux
/dev/hda4            2162        4865    21719880   83  Linux
/dev/hda5              34          66      265041    6  FAT16
/dev/hda6              67         132      530113+   6  FAT16
/dev/hda7             133         262     1044193+   6  FAT16
/dev/hda8             263         278      128488+  83  Linux
/dev/hda9             279         294      128488+  83  Linux
/dev/hda10            295         418      995998+  82  Linux swap
/dev/hda11            419         916     4000153+  83  Linux

Note that the bootable MS-DOS partition hda1 (DOS C:) comes first,
followed by an extended partition hda2 which needs to keep within the
MS-DOS 6.22 limit of no more than about 8M total for hda1 plus hda2.
Here hda2 has both DOS logical partitions hda5-hda7 (DOS D:, E:, F:),
and Linux logical partitions hda8 (Slackware 10.0 /boot), hda9
(planned /boot for Gentoo), hda10 (a swap partition for both distros),
and hda11 (planned /var for Gentoo).

Then, _following_ this extended partition, come two more primary
partitions, hda3 for Slackware / and hda4 for planned Gentoo /.

Anyway, this configuration illustrates two points raised in the
earlier discussions: it is possible to have a primary partition placed
after an extended partition (if the order otherwise follows the rules
of the applicable OSes), and also to use a single swap partition for
more than one Linux distro.

Most appreciatively,

Margo Schulter
mschulter at calweb.com