Hey guyz

I have a quick question about changing to a new hard drive.

I have two partitions, "/" and "/opt" on my old hard drive.
I want to use my new hard drive for debian but I want to be able to choose partition
(say I want one big partition for the whole hdd for example).



Can I also choose between other filesystems?
i.e. if reiserfs is better for my files then ext3.
(if you have a good idea on partitioning my 160 gigs feel free to tell me, i have 1 gig RAM so I might need a swap partition)

Last, but not least, I want to have a 10 gig windows partition on my old hard drive where linux is now,
but I'm not sure how to configure lilo since windows will erase MBR

I'm not sure how to set up my PC to read my new partition's MBR first.

Here is a quick summary:

1) Partition my new 160 gig hdd
2)copy linux from old 80 gig to new 160 gig HDD
3)Install windows on my 80 gig one
4) make them both bootable


Thanx very much folks

I think it is usually better not to have one large partition (like 160GB) if there is no special reason for that. Create partition for the root (/) and swap at least, but you could let some unpartitioned space in case you need an extra partition in future. What kind of partitions you need usually depends from what is the usage of the computer. I think reiser was developed for webservers that handles a lot of small files but it's ok for root filesystem too if you are not willing to use ext3 for some reason.

After creating the new partitions, you could just use live linux cd to copy all the files from the old hdd to the new one, modify bootloader and fstab if needed (if adding new hdd makes the new root partition be /dev/sda1 instead of /dev/hda1, for example) and the system should be ready to boot.

Then install windows on the old hdd as you like. After that, you should only need to re-install the bootloader