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On Friday 02 May 2008, Mark Knecht wrote: |
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> My Windows Vista laptop ate the big one from M$ and died under the |
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> weight of Windows Update. The hardware seems to check out fine |
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> overnight so I'm going to finally do dual boot on this machine like I |
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> wanted to when I bought it. |
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> |
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> Data: |
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> |
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> 80GB hard drive |
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> 2GB DRAM |
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> |
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> Questions: |
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> |
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> 1) What's the recommended order to install dual boot today. I prefer |
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> to go Gentoo first, XP second. Any issues? |
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All of this is mostly my own viewpoint from experience. There may be |
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other ways: |
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Other way round. Windows operating systems have a nasty habit of |
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assuming they are the only system on the machine and merrily trash |
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everything in sight for their own nefarious purposes. Then they |
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overwrite any existing bootloader. I do this: |
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Install XP. If you can get it to limit the partition size it uses, so |
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much the better |
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Resize windows partition downwards with Linux LiveCD. Most recent ones |
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support this. |
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Install Linux and set up a chainloader as normal in grub to boot windows |
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Finally boot Windows and let it do what it wants with the partitions |
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that need checking. This is expected behaviour caused by the downward |
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resize |
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> 2) What recommendations do folks have about splitting an 80GB drive |
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> up. I'm thinking of maybe 50-60GB for Gentoo, followed by Win XP |
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> using 20-30GB at the end of the drive. Partitions? I'm considering: |
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> |
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> sda1 -> /boot = 50MB |
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> sda2 -> swap (unsure whether I should dedicate 4GB to this. That's 5% |
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> of my drive and I won't likely ever use all of 2GB or RAM.) |
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> sda3 -> /var = 2GB |
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> sda4 ==extended |
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> sda5 -> / balance of Linux side, say 55GB |
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> sda6 == Windows drive C: |
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Again, you have to take account of windows brain-deadedness and the even |
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greater braindeadedness of windows "administrators". They don't expect |
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boot partitions.... |
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I would allocate as little as possible for windows itself. Say 10G, |
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which allows for the OS plus it's virtual memory file plus other cache |
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stuff |
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From sda2 onwards, lay out your partitions as for a regular Linux |
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installation. Use your own preferences for swap, lvm, filesystems etc. |
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Being able to share data between both OSes is useful, so leave the most |
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space possible for data: You have two options: |
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FAT32. This is gross and gives you no security. It's also the easiest as |
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both OSes support it out the box. |
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Ext3/ReiserFS: Better solution security-wise but requires some setup. |
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You have to download and install windows drivers from sourceforge. |
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There's a third option - use the ntfs-ng driver in Linux. It seems just |
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silly to use this for your main data storage though. |
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-- |
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Alan McKinnon |
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alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com |
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-- |
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