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Old 10-13-2005, 02:48 PM   #1
dudeman41465
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Registered: Jun 2005
Location: Kentucky
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Formatting a Hard Drive


I just got my desktop PC back from my girlfriend b/c I got tired of dealing with the propietary hardware in my laptop that only works with windows, so I gave her the laptop and took back my desktop. It dual boots Windows XP and Mandriva Linux 2005 Limited Edition. I am using the laptop to back up all of the files I want to keep and am going to wipe both hard drives clean and do a clean install of Mandriva 2005. I have a 20 GB master hard drive and an 80 GB slave for file storage purposes. I am thinking about making my root partition 8 GB, my swap partition 1 GB (both of which will be on the 20 gig), and the remainder of the 20 GB hard drive will be my /home parititon and I had one question. The 80 gig is partitioned into two 40 gig NTFS partitions. Using Linux how could I go about either merging those partitions and converting them to a linux fs partition or how would I go about just deleting those partitions and reformatting the whole drive in the linux file system? Or would I be better off to devote the entire 20 gig to my root and swap parititions, and devote the entire 80 gig to my home partition? I'm just looking for some "opinions", like if you were in my situation what would you do? I'm not really worried about keeping a drive secure now because with linux you're practically immuned to computer viruses and after I do this I never want to have to reformat it again.
 
Old 10-13-2005, 03:40 PM   #2
free_ouyo
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Registered: Mar 2004
Location: Belgium
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Formatting a Hard Drive

Hello, here is my opinion :

Use the 80Gb to install the Lnx system with
- 60Gb for /
- 1Gb for swap
- 19Gb for the /home

Use the 20Gb as a backup drive so after a fresh install on the 80Gb, take a full backup of the drive to the 20Gb.
If you have a problem like HD crash, you will have a clean OS.
--
free_ouyo
 
Old 10-13-2005, 04:03 PM   #3
titanium_geek
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Registered: May 2002
Location: Horsham Australia
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I'm not going to go into "how to partition" - it's very subjective.

however, the EASIEST way I have found for wiping the hdd and starting over is, using a knoppix live cd (booting using knoppix 2) to start cfdisk. use the up-down arrows to select the partition, the left right arrows to choose the menu option. delete the ntfs and reformat. it's fairly intuitive.

titanium_geek
 
Old 10-13-2005, 04:09 PM   #4
phil.d.g
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Registered: Oct 2004
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Interesting partition scheme free_ouyo!

dudeman41465, your plans for the 20Gb drive sound good to me.

If you have data on the 80Gb hdd you want keeping then there isn't much you can do. I'm not sure about merging ntfs partitions, nor would I like to try. I do however know that you can't convert ntfs partitions to ext3, reiserfs or whatever else may take your fancy.

The way to do it is to use a partitioning tool like fdisk, cfdisk, qtparted and delete the two ntfs partitions, then create a new partition for Linux. Of course you will lose all your data on that drive so make sure 1) you don't need it, or 2) you have it adequately backed up so you can restore it to the new linux partition
 
  


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