AK WROTE : 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 Linux 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? ************************** There are ways of installing linux on this setup without deleting partitions. I had a similar setup and worked my way around deleting partitions. One way to go about it would be to run defrag on your data partition and then resize it with a program like eg fips (a freeware program). If you have important data on that drive you should back it up FIRST, you have been warned. Then you can make logical partitions in the free space in your extended partition after your data partition, namely a swap partition (256MB should be fine) and you root partition. thos partitions would end up being called something like /dev/hda6 and /dev/hda7. your setup would then look like PRIMARY PARTITION Windows /dev/hda1 EXTENDED PARTITION /dev/hda2 LOGICAL PARTITION 1 DATA (FAT 32) /dev/hda5 LOGICAL PARTITION 2 Linux SWAP (Type 82) /dev/hda6 LOGICAL PARTITION 3 Linux native (Type 83) /dev/hda7 It might not be 100% by the book, but i worked fine for me. To actually dual boot you would then adjust your config file (lilo.conf or grub.conf) to it so it can boot either your linux or windows. Some boot loaders (eg lilo) used to have problems if the partition to boot wasn't within the first 1024 cylinders of the HDD, I don't know if that's true anymore, though. J. Niland __________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Tax Center - File online, calculators, forms, and more http://tax.yahoo.com - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-newbie" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.linux-learn.org/faqs