I'm thinking of going from dual booting SUSE 10 and XP to just SUSE full time. Linux seems to to do everything I usually do on XP - general internet stuff, music, video, the odd bit of word processing. There's just a couple of questions I have about the change over.

At the moment I have two hard drives, one primary master 80gb with XP, XP's programs and a small amount of personal data and a primary slave, 160gb, which has music and video files and other personal stuff that equates to about 50gb and SUSE which is roughly another 3gb.

I'd like to format the 80gb and keep that as a primary with SUSE installed on it and have the 160gb for data.

Would I be best off to format some of the 160gb as FAT32 (so if I ever need Windows again I can use the data on it) and transfer over my data like that?

Is FAT32 fine for music/video?

I've got SUSE set up pretty well for my liking and I've downloaded a lot of stuff for it, is there any way I can keep these programs so that I don't have to download them again after the transfer?

Sorry for the basic question, just don't wanna go and do it and find out there were avoidably mistakes I could have made.

Thanks


-dg

No problem. I have almost the same configuration, but with Debian, with the partition for data as FAT32 so I can see it from Linux and Windows. To see it from Linux you have to add a line in the file "/etc/fstab":
/dev/hdYX /mnt/data vfat auto,exec,user,rw,nosuid,umask=0 0 0
Change de Y and X in the "/dev/hdYX" field depending on your HD and partition. You can know your HDs structure with the comand "fdisk -l /dev/hda" and "fdisk -l /dev/hdb".
The "/mnt/data" field is the mounting point in the tree (you can change it).
vfat because of FAT32.
I don't really remember the rest but I can do everything so I wouldn't change it.
I've done this with Fedora Core 4 and guess it will work with SUSE.

I recommend both OSes on one drive, and the other for data. For example, with your drives:
#1:
10-15GB Windows (NTFS)
10-15GB Linux (ext3 or Reiser--+swap)
Balance left empty (unpartitioned) for now

#2:
One big FAT32 partition for data

New external USB drive for backup (get this first to do a backup before you mess with anything)

Later--when everything is working, you can use the free space on #1 for local backup, more data storage, more OS space--eg for apps, etc etc

Cool, thanks guys.

I think I have it pretty much sorted.

What's the fastest way to backup/transfer the data. 50 gb seems like it will take a long time.

The computer is 2.4 Ghz P4 and the HDD's are 7200 rpm if that makes any difference.

Thanks

-dg