On Fri, May 2, 2008 at 10:06 AM, Alan McKinnon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Friday 02 May 2008, Mark Knecht wrote: > > My Windows Vista laptop ate the big one from M$ and died under the > > weight of Windows Update. The hardware seems to check out fine > > overnight so I'm going to finally do dual boot on this machine like I > > wanted to when I bought it. > > > > Data: > > > > 80GB hard drive > > 2GB DRAM > > > > Questions: > > > > 1) What's the recommended order to install dual boot today. I prefer > > to go Gentoo first, XP second. Any issues? > > All of this is mostly my own viewpoint from experience. There may be > other ways: > > > Other way round. Windows operating systems have a nasty habit of > assuming they are the only system on the machine and merrily trash > everything in sight for their own nefarious purposes. Then they > overwrite any existing bootloader. I do this: > > Install XP. If you can get it to limit the partition size it uses, so > much the better > Resize windows partition downwards with Linux LiveCD. Most recent ones > support this. > Install Linux and set up a chainloader as normal in grub to boot windows > Finally boot Windows and let it do what it wants with the partitions > that need checking. This is expected behaviour caused by the downward > resize > > > > 2) What recommendations do folks have about splitting an 80GB drive > > up. I'm thinking of maybe 50-60GB for Gentoo, followed by Win XP > > using 20-30GB at the end of the drive. Partitions? I'm considering: > > > > sda1 -> /boot = 50MB > > sda2 -> swap (unsure whether I should dedicate 4GB to this. That's 5% > > of my drive and I won't likely ever use all of 2GB or RAM.) > > sda3 -> /var = 2GB > > sda4 ==extended > > sda5 -> / balance of Linux side, say 55GB > > sda6 == Windows drive C: > > Again, you have to take account of windows brain-deadedness and the even > greater braindeadedness of windows "administrators". They don't expect > boot partitions.... > > I would allocate as little as possible for windows itself. Say 10G, > which allows for the OS plus it's virtual memory file plus other cache > stuff > > From sda2 onwards, lay out your partitions as for a regular Linux > installation. Use your own preferences for swap, lvm, filesystems etc. > Being able to share data between both OSes is useful, so leave the most > space possible for data: You have two options: > > FAT32. This is gross and gives you no security. It's also the easiest as > both OSes support it out the box. > Ext3/ReiserFS: Better solution security-wise but requires some setup. > You have to download and install windows drivers from sourceforge. > > There's a third option - use the ntfs-ng driver in Linux. It seems just > silly to use this for your main data storage though. >
First, thanks to everyone for the quick answers. 1) I'll go with Windows first. That's relatively fast and if I run into hardware problems it will show up more quickly which is good. Saves me the time of doing the Gentoo install and then finding issues. 2) If I do Windows first then /dev/sda1 will be NTFS. Does this change how I install grub? I'm a little fuzzy as to where the MBR is. Is it in the first partition or in a special area by itself? The commands from the install guide is this: livecd conf.d # grub grub> root (hd0,0) grub> setup (hd0) quit I presume I'll use grub> root(hd0,4) to point at my root and still use grub> setup (hd0) to get grub installed into the MBR? Thanks, Mark -- gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org mailing list
