Three O/S's, Partitions, and Lilo
 

Hello,

Names Jason I'm new to the group and new to Linux.

I've decided to take the leap into Linux and have some questions about Flavours, partitions, and Dual Booting.

I'm on a 800Mhz P3, 512MG PC133 RAM, Via Chipset.

Harddrive 1 is 40G's and is Windows 2000 and is going to stay that way for a while.

Harddrive 2 is 30G's and is currently empty. (Had Red Hat 7.0 on it for about 6 months and never really even got booted after installation :0) Never had the time to try and learn it. Now I do!

I'm wanting to possibly install two versions of Linux on Drive 2 (or should I say dev/hdb?) so I can compare and play around some. I was thinking Debian 2.2r4 and Red Hat 7.2 (Any opinions) Can I install two versions?

I also want to have a 15G Partition on Drive 2 that will probably hold only .shn formatted music. I want to be able to access this partition from all of the O/S's including windows (if possible)

So here's my thinking (or possibly not)

5G's for Debian
5G's for Red Hat
15 G's for .shn's
and the remainder left unused for the time being

Can Red Hat and Debain share partitons ie, swap, usr, home etc.?

Can someone help me a set up a partition schema for this, (ie which should be primary, extended, logical) Which Partitions do I need, what size should I make them etc.

Can I configure Lilo for 3 O/S's?

I created a debain bootable CDROM, and am downloading the images to make a Red Hat right now.

Thanks in advance,

be gentle on the newbie

JB

You can do it. We'll say hda is out since win2k is there and that's that. hdb will have three partitions, two for red hat and debian and one for your audio files. Make the 15G a FAT or Windows partition, that way it'll be easier just to mount that in Linux and read it from win2k also. The other 10 megs, leave blank and when you install redhat or debian (whichever first, say RH), only use 5G for that install leaving 5G more blank space to specify for debian. I know you can boot all three, but I will stop here. That's what my generic setup for this situation would be. The specifics are up to you and as far as a bootloader, I know someone will explain how to triple boot a win2k/deb/rh system. I personally would rather use hda for one of the distros, but that depends on you of course. It can make it easier in areas. Hope this helped some at all. If not, at least got the wheels turning huh? LOL:)

you should use some of that spare space for a swap space. Both Distos should be able to use the same swap space (the installation program of red hat should detect it, im not sure bout debian).

you could have them both using the same /home partition. this would ensure that you have the same settings for your commonly used programs in both distros (such as for kde, gnome and mozilla. all keep config files hidden in your /home directory).
just make sure you give it enough space, you'll be amazed how quickly you can fill a /home partition!

as for the whole logical jobby, linux should be able to cope with them all seamlessly (logical and extended, if my memory is correct, are the same thing).

as for the triple boot you just need to have seperate sections in lilo.conf (configuration file for lilo) for LILO (the boot loader). Then you can choose from the lot of them. Make sure installation of linux you tell it to install LILO to the MBR (Master Boot Record).

Alex