Though my reply was a finely crafted piece of prose, it was basically like this.
Leave Winders alone. Backup ALL data since you can lose data no matter how careful you are. Defrag d: (extended part.) to minimise chance of data loss.
On Mandrake install, shrink d: to around 5.5GB (or whatever you think you'll need as this will be your shared Linux/Winders data drive). With the remaining space make 3 partitions, swap, / (Linux OS part.), /home (linux only data partition used by users home directories). Swap (rule of thumb) will be twice the size of your RAM. / needs to be about 2.5-3GB and the rest will be /home. You could make a small boot partition but you won't need it if you make sure and make boot disks.
Hope this helps,
Jason
PS, that eliminated the verbosity of my original post anyway =)
M X wrote:
Dear all,
I have a 20GB hard disk with a 5GB primary partition(C drive, DOS partition) and 15GB logical partition(D drive, extended DOS partition). The C drive has WinME and all application softwares and has 3.74 GB of free space. The D drive has all my data and has 9.84 GB of free space. I want to install Mandrake Linux 9.1 on this box.
i want to have a dual boot system and donot want to lose any existing data. can anyone please suggest how do i repartition my disk. ive read a few articles and HOWTOs on this and frm what i gather is that a dual boot system should look like this:
1)Windows partion (FAT32) 2)Linux partition 3)Swap partition 4)Partition for data accesible from Windows and Linux(FAT32)
now these articles explained this repartitioning when their original disk had a single primary dos partition. so my problem is how do i repartition my disk which has a primary and a logical partition?
also i have 128MB RAM. so what should be the size of my Swap partition?
thanks for your help .
ak.
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