If you really want to learn how to partition your hard drive(s) to multi boot and how the boot works and all about MBR's, and all the other assorted partition records, I suggest trying out Ranish Partition Manager. It's free. Although it's not as convienient as Partition Manager, it really forces you to learn. I have used it for 2 years now and I wouild never spend the money for Partition Manager. But then I like being able to control almost everything and learning about the MBR (Master Boot Record) and even using a hex editor on it. This is definately not something for the average user or if you just want to partition your drive to dual boot as quick as possible. This takes a lot of reading and searching the internet for information and saving the web pages and reading them over and over again. DO NOT do this if you are worried about losing all of your data on your hard drive, which you should already have backed up somewhere else. Please do not try this without backing up all of your data and at the very least, your current Master Boot Record, your partition info and each partition's record, any extended partition records and anything else along those lines. You can do this with Ranish (copy to file all the boot records) but make sure you put a copy of them on a floppy disc in case your hard drive won't boot. And of course make sure you have a working boot disc. I myself multi-boot Windows 98se, Windows 2000 Pro, Red Hat Linux 8.0 on one computer with the first hard drive split into 19 partitions and the second hard drive split into 10 partitions and a 2nd computer running DOS, WinNT 4.0, Win95, Red Hat Linux 6.0 that I'm setting up for learning and a 3rd computer that I'm about to set up with WinXP, Red Hat 9, and who knows what else. I use Ranish to partition them all and as the main boot manager. The thing that is nice about Ranish is that it has a simulated program with it with which you can learn how to use the program within Windows. Unfortunately, the simulated program is old and the simulated hard drive that you can work in it is pretty small, not much more than 1 or 2 GB if I remember correctly. But it still serves the purpose. You just make believe everything is 10 times bigger than it is. Make sure you get the newer versions of Ranish Partition Manager -- RPM v2.43 or v2.44. The earlier versions don't have the simulation and the earliest are really old, like when there were only motherboards with 8GB limits and a big hard drive was 1GB. The documentation that comes with v2.37, v2.38, v2.40, v2.42, and of course v2.43 and v2.44 are all somewhat different for the most part, and you will need them all.
There is nothing more rewarding than being able to understand the Boot Records and how OS's use them, and especially how Microsoft's fdisk is made to only let you make 1 active partition, when you are able to make 4 (per hard drive), and then to be able to make up to 32 partitions using Ranish Partition Manager and store them in Ranish's Boot Manager, switching between any group of 4 at boot.
For those of you who love to learn, this is a great area. And yes, you can boot from Ranish to Lilo to Linux. Simple. Good Luck

Steve,
Looking at your disk defragmentor page it looks like you defragmented it but did not yet resize the partition. You must resize the partition, using either Partition Manager or ntfs resizer, to make your windows partition smaller. Once you have done that, you should have a windows partition of whatever size you want and also an area of unused space. This is different from free space within your windows partition. This unused space should be at least 5 GB in size although I would suggest you make it bigger than that, at least 6 or 7 GB. It could even be half of the drive. Anyway, then when you have your smaller windows partition and an area of unused unpartitioned space, either partition and format it as ext2fs, a linux file system and then run the linux install or better still, simply run the linux installation and let linux partition and format what it needs, using only the unpartitioned (unused) space. If your distro is anything like mine (red hat), it will offer you the choices of a few different kinds of installs -- like a workstation install, or a server install, or a custom install, etc. Use the custom install. That will give you more choices over what you can do. Have Linux create a linux swap partition immediatly after your windows partition ends. Make it twice the size of your RAM or twice the size of the RAM amount you will have if you are going to add more memory sticks -- for instance, if you have or will have 512 MB of RAM, make your swap file 1,024 MB in size. Then have linux make your boot, root, usr, home, var, temp partitions if you know what you are doing or already know linux -- or if you don't, just let linux make 1 big partition and learn. If you do not us a boot manager (like partition manager, which will let you boot to either windows and then either lilo or grub into linux), you will probably be putting lilo into the MBR. Once you do this do not be alarmed when windows doesn't boot immediately, instead lilo will boot and you will have to add windows to the lilo boot menu so that lilo will boot either linux or windows. Good Luck. If you have any problems with the 1024 cylinder limit on your computer, please post your problem. Again, Good Luck

muyo 76 : too true.

wartstew : Yes to 1024, yes to 8GB : ASRock 1 year old, K7S8X, Phoenix BIOS, 2100+ AMD, 1GB, 120G + 80G, has both limits, and I know others that do, too.
Yes again to 2nd HD, and D*** yes to Win booting; I *thoroughly* agree that all who would change their partitions at all with any tools should learn all they can re MBR, partitions, *extended* partitions, bootloaders, &&&&c.
-- That Said, all reasonably friendly Linii can do a straightforward job safely & simply -- at last once there is non-partitioned space on the drive!

artjamz2 : Most Important First -- All ye who wouldst fain *jack* with your drives, heed well what yon sage hath said! -- (Good Job, artjamz2!) Now:
Thanks for the tip on Ranish -- I'll look into it! (saved this page locally, too)
I also have used hex editors on the MBR since around Noah's time, bot if you think *thats* fun, try hexeding an extended partition... 8|
PM is pretty darn good, although I admit not perfect -- I currently have a drive that got wonked, and all PM will tell me is PARTITION TABLE ERROR XXXX, and not let me do ding with it, much less Dong! -- Linux tools are slowly getting it back online when I have time -- already have main DOS 2GB & Linux 70GB partitions restored with no loss.
(Hmmm... my ide0master=20 partitions & ide0slave=9, I thought *I* was the only one who still had need to do such, we gotta form a club! )

i donnt like windows while u use windows server ,it is so senstive above the partition table, so if use it ,no good to modefy ur 1st partition
on my PC
1st---3.5g NTFS Windows Server Pri Active hda1 C:
2nd--6.5g NTFS Pri hda2 D:
3rd---10g FAT32 Pri hda3 E:
4th---0.1g ext3 /boot Ext hda5
5th---3.9g ext3 / Ext hda6
6th---6g ext3 /home Ext hda7
7th---10g FAT32 /back Ext hda8 F:
well i use ntldr as my boot loader ,and use winhex made a file from the
boot sector of the /boot ,so linux can be choose directly from the boot-
menu of windows
So far it works well

Yes, this is another good way to do it. The Windows boot loader is limited however, I've heard that it will only support one non-windows boot entry. Very dumb.

Yes, thanks for pointing this out because I don't think it was clear until now. The idea is to get free, unpartitioned space on your hard drive for your Linux installer to deal with, unless your installer happens to do NTFS resizing for you. Once you have the space, the install should be fairly painless.

I disagree with with this "rule-of-thumb" and feel it is obsolete today. It originally was more useful in deciding on how much memory you should have instead of how much swap space. Let me explain: What is important is how much total memory you need to run the kinds of applications you are planning to run on your computer. This is a total of RAM + Swap. Then if your swap ends up being *more* than twice what the RAM you are planning to have, then the speed of your computer will be very compromised, and you need more RAM. These days RAM is cheap as compared to years ago, so often people have a lot more RAM than they really need. For example, if you have 512 MB of RAM in your computer and you are just going to use it as a common desktop system (Web browsing, E-mail, Office apps, nothing real intense like major video editing) then you could actually get away with no swap file at all! (although I wouldn't recommend it). This Laptop I am currently using, running has 256 Megs of RAM, I have the swap file set at only 100 Megs, and I don't think I've ever filled it to more than halve way up, and that was while running Synaptic on Debian-unstable (looking at 14,000 packages), Mozilla, KDE, and watching a DVD at the same time!

[B]

Good advice. There are often good reasons to partition up your file system, but until you have a good reason to do so, it is easier to just keep everything in one big partition.



No, you will end up putting lilo on the MBR if it is the only OS you are installing on the computer. This is because you have to at least have some kind of bootstrap code there.

My point is that if you are going to let Windows occupy this computer too, I recommend letting Windows have the MBR. Put lilo (with its boot selector) on the linux partition only. Then set the "Active Partition" to your Linux partition. This way the computer boots, jumps to your boot selector on the linux partition, which then gives the option to jump back to the Windows partition and boot Windows instead of Linux. It all works great, and it is easy to go back to a Windows only system if you need to be simply resetting the Active Partition to your Windows partition. With Lilo on the MBR, if you wipe out your Linux partition (where the 2nd stage of lilo lives), then your computer will not boot until you re-install a Windows MBR (the "fdisk /mbr" thing, or more typically these days, do a boot sector repair from the Windows install CDROM). Lilo *is* a little hard to learn (but worth it), so if you would rather use another boot selector, either WinNT/2K/XP ntldr as mentioned earlier, or a third party one also mentioned, then it will likely live on the MBR (or at least some of it will), and will work great. With a 3rd party boot selector, you need to be careful that some Windows utility doesn't wipe it out under the name of "restoring the boot sector" or something like that.

Yes, most Linux installers should help you through this step or do the whole thing automatically. Sometimes they get it wrong however, so it is important to learn which partition your Windows is on (probably the first one on the first drive) and know how to express it in Linux terms ("/dev/hda1" for the example above). In case you need to make a correction. By-the-way, the MBR (actually the whole drive) is expressed as "/dev/hda" where as if Linux is on partition 2 your Lilo config file might need to say "install=/dev/hda2" instead to install lilo on the Linux partition instead of the MBR.

Wartstew,
Thank you so much for the update on the old swap file rule of thumb of double the amount of your RAM. It's good to see someone out there is listening (or reading). Also, thank you for correcting my mistake about putting Lilo or Grub into the MBR. What I meant to say was - "into the /boot or /(root) partition. I must be getting old. My bad. Thanks for the assist and the very good in depth advice. Good luck to you.
artjamz2