I've wanted to migrate from winxp to FC3 for a while, and since i'm on break and don't have school work due right now, I decided to give it a go. I ran into my first problem when i was trying to partition my hard drive. I read in a fAQ that the system runs the best when you give the swap 2 gigs and make it the first partition (because of faster rpms as the hard disk spins). Anyway, since this is a first install i dont' really want to go crazy with a thousand partitions so I'm just doing /, /boot, and swap. However, no matter what order i create them in disk druid, it always puts /boot first, / second, and swap 3rd. Is there another way I could manually configure this? Also, will my system run slower since I combined everything into one big / partition? Thanks for the input

I have never used FC. Is there an option to partition with fdisk? This will take care of your problem.

Okay, Fedora doesn't allow me to use fdisk, however I think i will boot from a windows-formatted floppy and make my three partitions from there. My only question is, I know how to create a primary dos partition -- FDISK 1/PRI:50000 (50 gig dos partition) -- but what is the syntax for a ext3 and swap file type? Thanks.

maybe you can just type fdisk with no options and follow their instructions?

For your first install,keep it simple,let fedora partition the disk,when it asks you if you want to use the whole disk say yes if it will be the only one,If you have windows on the same drive,the best way is to just leave as free space what you want to use for fedora and it will do the rest.

This is nonsense.

How much swap you need depends on how much RAM you have and what your system load is like. Typically you allocate a bit more swap than you have RAM. I personally run a heavily loaded workstation with Mandrake 10, and I am always running VMWare with one or two copies of Windows 2000 loaded. My system has 1 Gig of RAM and I have a 1 Gig swap that rarely exceeds 250 Megs used. So it just depends.

As far as "faster rpms as the hard disk spins" that is simply nonsense. The access time is sensitive to the angular rate of the platter, and that is constant regardless of where the head is on the disk.

Let the installer format the drive the way it wants to. You won't notice any impact on performance. You also won't notice any impact on performance having / in one partition on the same drive. To increase that performance, you would need to install the various elements of / on different drives in order to have asynchronous access.

I pulled this off by doing a manual partitioning when installing FC3, be defining the following:

* 40Gb partition (made with Partition Magic under XP)
then ran FC3 installer and made:
* 100Mb partition mounted as /boot, type EXT3
* remaining partition as type LVM in which I defined:
* 1Gb swap (my machine is using 512Mb RAM, so twice the no.)
* rest as Linux filesystem disc

This works like a charm, altho I am a bit puzzled as to why GNUB will show 2 bootable Linux partitions, the 1st named "<kernel-version>smp" and the 2nd one just "<kernel-version>". Only the 2nd will boot. Anyone?