dualbooting gentoo 2004.2 and winXP on laptop
 

Hey guys, i was wondering if you could help me to decide what size partitions to use on my laptop when I install gentoo 2004.2 (in like 30 minutes i hope).

I'm planning on dual booting gentoo 2004.2 and windows xp pro on the following system, keep in mind its a laptop:

Its a Dell Inspiron 5150:
3.06GHz Pentium 4 processor
1GB ram
60GB hard drive
ATI Mobility Radeon 9000
802.11a/b/g wireless card
DVD-RW/CD-RW

I'm looking at putting linux on the front end of the drive, and windows on the back, with a very large shared fat32 partition in between that both OS's can use, I just need suggestions for parition sizes and anything else that you guys would recommend.

I'm planning on the following:

hda1 - linux boot - ext2 - 32mb
hda2 - linux swap - (swap) - 1.5GB
hda3 - linux filesystem - ext3 - [I don't know how big]
hda4 - big ass storage space - fat32 - [I don't know how big]
hda5 - windows xp filesystem - NTFS - [I don't know how big]

So first off, does it sound like i'm sort of on the right track? Next, how big should I be making these OS partitions as opposed to the fat32 partition which I want the OS's to share? Please help!

Hi Gauntalus,

Nooo, don't do that. WinDoze pretty much needs to at least think it's on the first partition. It's also simpler to install WinDoze first as it's going to clobber the mbr on your drive.

Yeah, you can use grub to make Windoze think it's on the first partition. But is it worth the effort? Not in my book, just let it have it.

Yeah, you can install Windoze after Linux. You better have a boot disk, or repair CD handy to reinstall your boot loader. Or you can use ntldr to boot Linux, it works well. I did that for a couple of years. Simplest is install Linux second and just use grub unless you have a usb keyboard, then you want to use lilo.

hda1 XP Pro ntfs 10 gig should be plenty
hda2 /boot ext2 32-50 meg (it's past cyl 1024, but that an anchient limitation)
hda3 swap 1.5 gig is OK, but it'll probably rarely use it, 1 gig should be plenty unless you're going to be doing something pretty heavy duty.

extended partitions for the rest of the drive
hda4 / ext3 or reiser 10 gig s/b plenty
hda5 /home 1 or 2 gig s/b plenty
hda6 /vfat the rest of the drive

Always keep home on it's own partition, if you hose your install you can just reinstall and you keep your files in /home and that saves all your personal settings. You'll like that little feature...

Just leave the firat partition and you can install XP later, but you will have to reinstall grub. gentoo.org has an excellent grub install guide in the install docs.

good luck, have fun ;)