Hello I have downloaded the 5 CDs for Linux Suse 10 and I wish to dual boot it with XP pro.

Not sure which partition to install on though. These are shown as options:

68.3 HPFS/NTFS C drive with XP on
43.3 Extended
40.4 HPFS/NTFS local disc E

Please advise which to install on.

Oh and it also says you are installing 32 bit software on a 64 bit machine - is it advisable to get 64 bit linux (or is there such thing). Complete noob question - would i get higher screen resolutions?

Thanks for any advice
John

Assuming you don't want to resize anything, the extended partition would probably be the way to go.

Is disc E a for your data? If so I'd recommand backing up what's on it and reformat as FAT32. That way you can also write to it from your SUSE.

As for 32bit vs 64 bit I'd bet there's a lot posts around with that information that you should look for. The 64bit is supposed to be a bit faster, but probably not enough to notice a whole lot. The downside is there's some software that won't work on 64bit without some tweaking. I run 64bit for my ubuntu setup and 32 for Arch. The only real difference I see is that I can install more things without needing to do special setups. For now I'd say to go with 32bit until 64bit becomes more common and better supported.

As your hard drive is currently partitioned, you can't install SUSE. It's a different filesystem; not the same as windows. You must create a Linux partition to install SUSE.

Or, given that small hard drives are almost dirt cheep today, get a 30 to 40 gig drive and set it up as slave (the drive you have now should be jumpered to Master), and install SUSE on the slave drive.

If you have Partition Magic, cut that local disc E down to half-size. Then insert the CD 1 of the SUSE installation set, and partition the free space for Linux. Then install SUSE there.

As for the 32bit/64bit thing, it'll still run, though not taking full advantage of the 64bit capabilities. You could check to see if SUSE 10 is available in 64bit version.

You need to free up some space on the hard disk drive to install
linux. Suse will find the empty space and also install a
bootloader that will dual boot with XP. There is no need to use
the 64 bit version, the 32 bit will work and still has fewer
problems than the 64 bit versions of Suse.
If you have nothing in the extended partition then just delete it
in windows XP and then boot from your Suse CD to start the
install in the empty 43 gig space.

I just installed on 5 cd's also. I installed a slave hard drive, formatted it in windows first, went into bias and made sure start sequence for booting was cdrom,a,hd then put 1st disc in cdrom and restarted. The 1st cd will partion everything, not to worry.

"If you have Partition Magic, cut that local disc E down to half-size. Then insert the CD 1 of the SUSE installation set, and partition the free space for Linux. Then install SUSE there."

Thanks for the help everyone. Going on this advice - should I get rid of the extended partition and just half the local disc E. I do have partition magic.

Its just that someone said I should use an extended partition.

Cheers

Ok thanks but some people are saying use the extended partition and some are saying use the normal E one therefore I do not know what to do.

Sorry I have not followed the whole thread, but this may help:

On a disk, you are allowed 4 primary partitions. The only thing magic about "primary" is that the mbr will only hold four partition table entries. The hack for this (I don't know the history) is the "extended" partition which somehow pints the system at more entries outside the mbr---called "logical" partitions.

Using this scheme you can have something like 60+ partitions on one drive.

If you don't more than 4 partitions, then you don't need extended.

Perhaps one reason for using extended would be to provide room to expand...?

Ok i only need two partitions therefore I will use the the E and get rid of the extended. Is the FAT32 the type that linux usually uses then, and if I made it this type then I suppose I could write to it from linux (like a linux harddrive i suppose?)?

If I can figure these things out I will go ahead.

Cheers

I think I missread your original post a bit, but here's what I see now.

You'll need to have at least two partitions, one for windows and another for suse which would probably be ext3 though there's a few other options. I'd recommend a few extra partitions for different things.

First you'll almost certainly want to have a swap partition. This is some extra disk space used to supplement your RAM. The recommendation is usually to have twice the swap as your ram, but you could probably get by with at least 500 mb.

I like having a separate partition for my /home folder, which is where all your personal data is. It really saved me a week ago when I broke my Arch installation upgrading xorg and decided to reinstall. Since the /home was separate I still had all my settings and everything which made the whole process a lot quicker.

Since you're dual booting it might also be a good idea to have a partition to share between windows and linux. XP uses NTFS, which linux can read, but writing to is not generally possible, while windows can't even recognize linux file systems. If you have a FAT partition though, both can write to that.

If it helps this is my partition setup:
80Gb drive
30Gb for XP
500 MB for swap
The rest for my FAT32 shared files (music, papers, pictures,etc)
40Gb drive (split for ubuntu and Arch)
2x8GB for each of my two linux / partitions
2x1.5 GB for each of my /var (read some people recommend it, but I noticed it fills up kind of quick, might merge it into my root partition sometime soon)
2x500 MB for each of my /tmp partitions (read that sometimes things can start writing to the tmp folder and fill the whole partition, this way it will only trash that one folder)
The rest split for two /home partition, with symbolic links to the FAT32 partition on the other drive to make it easy to access those.

Heres the plan:

70GB for XP pro

3GB NTFS for linux swap (this was unallocated before and is now a linux swap partition that is specified in partition magic)

42GB disk E NTFS converting to FAT32 to put Linux on (can copy from linux to this i hope - lol)

Got extended still but not using it.

cheers

I use a "triple boot" system with SUSE, Xandros and Windows XP. The easiest way to set it up is with something like "Partition Commander" (there are others that are as good or better). This will let you establish the partitions and WON'T break your Windows. You can start with the 5 CD's and one of the early questions it will ask is how to partition your harddrive. Select manual and set up a partition for SUSE. It will automatically assign a swap partition. This does not give you as much flexibility as using "Partion Commander". I find that always setting up SUSE last is best as the PC then uses the SUSE GRUB for booting. You shouldn't have to, but may have to, insert the Windows XP disk and go into a repair mode to re-write the boot.ini. SUSE has always done it for me. Good luck.

Sorry, but this has problems:

Windows XP goes on NTFS partition
Linux goes on EXT3 partition
Don't use Windows letter designations--Linux will never show these. Use the basic drive IDs--eg /dev/hda for the first IDE drive


While your allocation (with corrections) will work fine.....
I believe a better answer is something like this:
15GB Windows NTFS
15GB Linux EXT3
1GB swap
Balance FAT32 for shared data