[newbie] Looking for advice

[Paul Kaplan]

I have a new machine at work that has W2K Pro on a single 40Gb NTFS partition.  
I plan to resize the partition and install LM9 on the drive so as to be able 
to dual boot.  Since there are some files that I need to be able to 
read/write from both environments and I don't have the option of converting 
the NTFS partition to fat32, I'm thinking I will need at least three 
partitions; one for W2K, one for Linux, and one to hold my working 
directories.  I expect to have the machine for 3 years (lease term), but I 
don't anticipate my company upgrading W2K during that time.  My current W2K 
install uses ~3-4Gb and I have another 4-5Gb of user stuff that I keep 
locally.

My questions:
What are people's thoughts on a partitioning scheme?  One option is 4 x 10 Gb, 
with 1 W2K, 1 Linux, and 2 x vfat.
Do people think this will allow for reasonable bloat (oops growth) on the W2K 
side over the next three years (software inventory  management software, 
virus software)?  How about the Linux side?
What about vfat as a choice for the transfer partition?  Would I be better to 
use ext2/3 and find a W2K solution for reading/writing to ext2/3?  (My 
preference however is ReiserFS for Linux.)  Any experience/suggestions for 
such a tool?

TIA,
Paul



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Re: [newbie] Looking for advice

[Stephen Kuhn]

On Thu, 2003-06-19 at 20:55, Paul Kaplan wrote:

 My questions:
 What are people's thoughts on a partitioning scheme?
GENEROUS WHACK

This is how I generally do it - as I setup/sell machines with dual-boot
quite often and dislike future issues - and most of the machines that
cross my path have at least the one 40gb drive:

* Win2k/WinXP partition: 10gb (primary partition)
  (Installed before any other OS)

* Linux parition: 8gb
  (/boot is a primary, all the other partitions, if required, are
extened - and I LOVE ReiserFS)

* Data (shared) partition: 22gb
  (FAT32 partition sharable between the two OS's)

K.I.S.S.

...and if you want to go one better, you can just install MDK on the
whole lot, and then use VMWare to run Win2k inside of MDK...
(Then you never have to reboot...you might have to close down the VMWare
session with Win2k, but hey, we're all used to that...)

-- 
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