[vox-tech] Three Install Questions

[Wilson Shealy]

Hi everyone,

I'm in the middle of converting my dual boot XP/RH9 box into an XP/Suse 9.2/Sarge box and I have a couple of questions that I hope someone here can help answer.  The first is probably easy. The other two may not be.

1.  Are there any disadvantages (except disk space) to having an oversized Swap partition?  I've decided to double mine so that I can double my RAM at a future date.

For the other questions you need some background.  I have one hard drive dedicated to XP and another to Linux.  This was the same setup I had before with XP/RH9.  In the past I would copy the boot sector from the Linux disk to the root directory of my XP install and point the Windows bootloader at it.  This way I could maintain all the trappings of my factory XP install (ugh!) on the 1st disk and use it to "boot" the GRUB bootloader on the linux disk.  

For some reason, this boot method doesn't seem to be working anymore.  The only two major changes that I can see are that I've moved from EXT3 to Reiser on the Linux disk and that I don't have a seperate partition for /boot as before.

2.  Could the use of the Reiser FS be somehow tripping up the boot method?

3.  I have a fairly new computer (~2yrs) and was under the impression that I wouldn't need a separate partition for /boot.  Was that an incorrect assumption?  Since I intend to put Sarge on the same drive, it would seem cluttered to have two /boot partitions in addition to two root partitions.

Thanks for any help you can give.

Wilson Shealy