Partioning, and dual booting with two HDD

scaphist · 04-20-2007, 12:41 PM

I have an 80gig HDD that I like running my OS off. I have a 200 gig hdd that I like to reserve as a "media drive". It has all my pictures, music, and videos on it, nothing else. Both drives are NTFS. Would I be able to dual boot Feisty Fawn/XP on the 80 gig and still be able to read from the 200 gig drive when enabling the NTFS support for Ubuntu? Does anyone see any problems with that?

Also, given the fact that no drives have been partitioned, does the new Ubuntu installer CD have a good partioning feature?

Nishtya · 04-20-2007, 12:54 PM

If you want to install Ubuntu, you will need to make space for it on that 80 gig drive. You will need at least two partitions formatted with a linux file system and linux swap. Most popular for root is ext3. You will also need a smaller partition formatted linux swap (you will get different opinions on size of swap, search here and you will see). 1 gig of swap space is generally sufficient. You may want a separate home partition for your linux. Ubuntu may or may not suggest that. I don't use Ubuntu myself but I heard it is is very user friendly and does include a paritioner tool. They have excellent starter guides. But always back up important data before repartitioning with any tool!

You will certainly be able to put grub on the mbr and choose whether to boot Ubuntu or Windows. Ubuntu will be able to read your windows NTFS parititions on both disks. Whether linux can write safely to NTFS is a touchy subject, I think you will get different opinions on that.

Junior Hacker · 04-20-2007, 06:14 PM

There's absolutely no problems with the plan you have. Hopefully Ubuntu can resize Windows, only way to tell is to go through the steps, commitments will only be made after going through the partitioning and all looks good, then you commit. No need for a separate /home partition, just go with / and swap as you can install ntfs-3g to read/write to the ntfs media drive. My Debian Etch is the only distribution I installed ntfs-3g from it's repositories, all my other distributions I used the latest version from source which is easy to install.
http://www.ntfs-3g.org/