I've looked around the forums for a little while and haven't found exactly what I'm looking for... I'm partitioning my hard drive and dual booting Windows 98SE with Linux Redhat 9. I'm not sure how to go about partitioning, however. I have an 80 gb HD and I want a:

-30 gb fat32 partition for Windows
-25 gb fat32 partition which will be "shared" between the OS' (I plan to keep files that I want accessible in both Windows and Linux on it)
-a 25 (ext3? ext2? what should choose?) gb partition for Redhat 9.

Using fdisk, should I create the two fat32 partitions and leave 25 gb of free space, then during the Redhat install let Redhat automatically partition using available free space? Or what? Any help will be greatly appreciated!

From what I've seen, that is the recommended way of doing it. Windows first. Leave some free space. Then let Red Hat's install partition the free space.

Why are you going to put Win98se on 30gb? Even with all of the tweaks from Axel's http://members.aol.com/axcel216/0.htm 30GBs is too big to be managable. The bigger it is--the more likely 98 will hose it up.

Do a layout on paper. Every program that you have which will give you an option to install the files to a different location than Program Files--try to remember--you can put elsewhere. Wander around that site I mentioned above, it isn't just for "gamers". Much of the stuff applies to anybody running 98-98se. The XP stuff is good too.

If this is going to be a fresh install for everything, including 98. you must install windows first.

Windows 98 is not happy with multiple windows primary partitions, non-windows partitions are ignored. If you wanted to make a shared /DATA partition it should be the first logical partition (the first partition residing in the Extended partition).

If all I had was fdisk, I would make the first windows partition less than 2GBs as primary (and set as bootable), and try to keep it as clean as possible.

I would then create an extended partition which did not fill the drive. The size would be the private windows partition (non-shared with linux size=28GBs)+ the shared partition (All of the shared stuff + the windows swapfile. Size=25GBs) + 5GBs (you want to assign the linux swap partition in here and maybe leave the rest unused for emergencies.)

Write everything down. Then you can use the rest of the space for linux.
If you have partition magic or other nifty stuff available I would get much more specific.

Please, Please, P-L-E-A-S-E read The Linux Installation Guide before doing the install. This is online at RedHat.

The Linux Documentation Project has a lot of howtos and Guides. Including The Performance HowTo and HowTo Partition. Good Reading.
http://www.tldp.org


You want to make 98se as small and compact as possible. It runs much better that way--don't stop reading.

You can assign 3 primary 1 primary--extended, and up to 46 logical partitions on a IDE hard drive. With windows you run out of letters at Z--less floppy, dvd, and cdburner. Believe me, you have room.

With linux, you only have to share the partitions you wish to. As you are going to have to create a directory in /mnt and make an entry in /etc/fstab for every FAT32 partition you want to share.

On my dual boot win98se and RedHat Linux version 9 actual disk usage follows__________________________________________________
#rem: My other box has all of my programming and windows utilities--I'll try to fudge that in

Size Used Available
/dev/hda1 Windows 1.6GB 688M 894M
/dev/hda2 /BOOT 99M 20M 75M
/dev/hda3 Is an extra swap in case I have to do major work on the box.
/dev/hda4 / 1.9GB 248M 1.4GB

I have five drives but they are mostly smaller ones from previous upgrades on my workstation. Above is 4 primary partitions on a 4gb drive

/dev/hde1 /usr 4.07GB 2.4GB 2.2GB
/dev/hde2 /win_data 2.0GB 656M 1.4GB
/dev/hde3 /opt 985M 20K 935M
RedHat doesn't use /opt for anything, I shouldn't have made a partition for it--but people use it as a place to custom build pkgs which don't come with the distribution. So I figured WTF.

/dev/hdg1 /var 4.7GB 455M 4.0GB
/dev/hdg2 /tmp 985M 696K 935M

*********************************************************
There are others--which are mounted into /var and /opt.
/home, in my case is kept small, because I keep other stuff in a /DATA partition. But you should be getting a pretty accurate picture by now of the general sizes. Home can grow very large if you don't watch it.

/usr is where everything beyond the command-line is kept. All of the Development stuff, the extended commands for Administration, the kernal source, and all of the libraries and stuff for the X-server and X-Windows. It can get pretty large, but you are supposed to keep it cleaned up. The larger anything is the longer it takes for the system to find it.

/var is where up2date keeps all of the updates and where you would be putting webpages and associated service logs, your print spooler is there as well. Again, when it comes to the logs or anything that can get huge, you can break it into other partitions to keep it managable--and do the mounting "auto-magically" in /etc/fstab. (The order of the entries in /etc/fstab is important--you can't mount to something that isn't there. so you must set it up so everything goes as planned.)
/tmp is the system's "scratch-pad". It is very dynamic in its usage. When creating ISO images you are going to put them in /tmp.

You probably noticed the lack of entries for the swap-partition. I got lazy, I didn't type them. There are 4 active swap-files on my system. Remember, I have 5 drives. This way if a drive is busy, the system doesn't have to wait to swap pages of memory to a drive, it just spits them out and keeps track. One drive=One Swap partition. (And one windows swap-file.)

On the work-station, I have 20GBs of stuff. I have the windows SDK and Borland IDE and a boat-load of programs (including Office), Set up stuff, a driver database, and my techie stuff. I do want to get Visual C++. Oh, I almost forgot, 1,4GBs of games. (I have 24+ kinds of pinball, and most of the old arcade games--they all can be made to run on XP.)

So it should be something like this..

1) 2 GB Primary Bootable
2) 53.3 GB Extended
-1st Logical Partition 25 GB (Shared partition)
-2nd Logical Partition 28 GB (Private Windows partition)

And the remaining automatically partitioned by the Redhat installer?

Thank you for the help!

Make sure that the Extended partition has extra space in it for the swap partition--which is going to be double your ram size (or <762M--frankly when I actually checked page file usage, with 512M of ram, I didn't really need more than 512M of swap--the real deal is the absolute upper limit for swap space + ram is 2GB for an 32 bit intel-type of processor. It is highly unlikely that you need more than one third of that as your total for ram + swap space in windows or linux.).

You can just make the extended partition cover the rest of the drive, but I prefer to have the linux "/boot" partition a primary partition right next to windows 98se. (And windows 98 must be the first primary partition.)

So, realistically, The first primary is 2GB, the Second primary is going to be 100M (linux /boot). Don't let windows use the second primary. The third partition is going to be the windows extended type, and just fill the rest of the drive with it. The first logical partition should be FAT32--make it the private one and leave off of the shared one until after installing linux.

Why? Well, the respective /Swap partition and windows swap-file should be as close to the center of the physical disk as possible. This give you the best performance. If you are just trying to make the damn thing work, it's not really all that important. I could tell the difference, but it could be mental--I don't know. (If you don't want to bother with forcing 98se to have a swapfile on a different partition that's ok too. 2GBs doesn't take long to defrag or check-disk. 30GBs would be an exercise in patience, to say the least. You would have to be a black-belt in computer-fu to put up with that.)

Read the http://www.tldp.org Partition Howto and Performance HowTo, and peruse the windows site I mentioned. I believe it is worth the bother. I hate to let anthing "auto-partition" my drives. I hate to have drives with no unused space for emergencies (to create back up images or extra partitions in.)

Aside from a boot floppy disk-- and properly preparing for install with a hardware list and all of the needed settings which you will find out by reading The Linux Installation Guide online at RedHat--the first thing you need to do on a properly running system is generate a "KickStart" file and burn it to a CD for backup. As a newbie I think I invented new ways to hose a system.

With Kickstart, you aren't making an image of a possibly buggy install, you are generating a file which will automate a new install. You never will have to go through the complete install process again. Just make a kickstart floppy, stick it in the "A" drive after the install CD boots, and give the command for it to look there. It will hammer in an install as fast as you CD-ROM can read the files to the hard drive.

Of course, I got really good at doing manual installs--so can you, it's your choice.

Okay I just read the partitioning documentation.. I'm still kind of confused.. So should I set up my partition layout to look something like this:

hda1---win98 partition---------2 gb--------fat32--------1st primary and bootable?
hda2---linux boot---------------100mb-----ext3?-------2nd primary bootable
hda3---rest of drive space-----77.9 gb----notype?----Windows extended partition
hda4---Win98 Private----------28 gb-------fat32--------1st logical partion under the extended partition

Then install Windows onto hda1

Then install RH9 and during install create a 2nd logical partition under the extended partition (24.6 gb) + a 3rd logical partition for swap (300 mb) = 24.9 gb

I now have 25 gb of free space under the extended partition so do I go back into fdisk and create a 4th logical partition under the extended partition and make it fat32?

Please forgive my not understanding very well for I am a

Thank you very much for your help.

This is how my system is set up:

hde1 8.7GB NTFS C: (WindowsXP) <--> /mnt/win_c (read only)
hde2 1.0GB FAT32 D: <--> /mnt/win_d (RW for passing stuff between WinXP and RH)
hde6 1.4GB ext3 / (Redhat 9.0)
hde7 0.5GB swap
hde8 3.8GB ext3 /usr
hde9 3.6GB ext3 /home

I only use WinXP for games, MS Money (I hope to convert to Gnucash soon) and a few programs that I haven't found a linux version that I like yet. Hde6, 7, 8 & 9 were initially autosized by Mandrake 9.1. The sizes work for my 20GB hard drive fairly well, so I left them that way when I installed RH. I once ran into a space issue on the /mnt/win_c drive because of a large number of unused games, of which I ultimately cleared off the drive.

I hope this helps.

Thanks :-D So your bootloader is located in hde1?

Grub (or any bootloader for that matter) has a component in the Master Boot Record, which is located in the very beginning of the drive.

This component points to a file name in linux /boot ( or in Win2K or NT or XP--boot.ini; in 98se the other one--which I can't remember at the moment)
This loads a binary file which gets the whole ball rolling.

/boot should be ext2. Which is native to the kernal. Unless it is a production type machine, I set everything in linux to ext2--except /swap which either doesn't have a file system or has it's own filesystem. I haven't really delved into that, so I'm not sure how it works, just that it does.

Logical partitions start their numbering at 5 in both linux and windows boot.ini So:

#1 would be the windows O.S. 2GB (windows "C:\")

#2 would be linux /boot 100M

#3 windows extended to fill the rest of the drive

#5 the "private" windows FAT32 for all of the stuff not shared between Linux and Windows. You wanted 30GB devoted to windows only, so 28GB
(This would be windows "D:\")

Then Format #'s 1 & 5 with windows format. Load Win98se into 1. Leave #2 unformatted.

Then load linux. Remembering to set up #2 as being ext2 with the "mount point" (Volume Label) as /boot.

Then / [Again, volume labels are called "mount points" in set up] (#6) Again you saw how much room it takes when things are split off it. Go ahead and leave /opt and /tmp there and add 3GBs with a CD-Burner; 10GB if you have a DVD-burner. [In case you forget to clean up iso images.]

Then /usr (Which would be #7) you saw the amount of actual space it took on my drive and how much room I left it.

Then /swap (#8) 500-700M to be sure, you have the room. This puts the swap partition in the center of the drive.

Then /shared (or other name; #9; Windows "E:\" and Linux /dev/hda9 set it up as a FAT32 logical partition but don't put a file system on it. Do that with windows, don't worry if it does, just remember to reformat with win98 to be sure of compatability. Size=20GB? [Who knows, you may get around to putting the windows swap file in there.]

Then /var (#10) Again, in the above article I told you the exact size which is being used for /var not counting databases or mail servers or web-pages to be served or server specific logs.

Then /home (where your downloads as user (---not /root) go by default. If you run as root; the downloads go there (/root). Separating it makes it easier to back up. It doesn't have to be all that large, try to remember to keep it cleaned up and move stuff to your /shared drive or another partition for back up. [ If you do a bunch of downloading give your self enough room for that. Then, as soon as you can, learn to direct the downloads to a space set aside for that.]

Ohh. Thank you for explaining that. So the method of partition and installation I described earlier will work? And do I make the boot partition bootable? or hda1 (the win98 partition) bootable?

Your original Win98se would be flagged as *active (bootable).

As you might have guessed I am a truly rotten, and very slow typist. Sorry.

In the above entry, when I talk about the Linux volumes/mount points being added: You are doing that in the linux installation with manual partition creation and assignment.

Do it any way you want. Linux is supposed to be exactly as you want it to be. I gave you exact disk usage on my machine. I don't have an "everything" install. I have the workstation install with a few other additions. It is my home linux machine, not a web-server (although I have the things in there to create and upload pages to a web-server). I also have some other stuff which I can mount and start services for (like the practice databases and a practice webserver--with related logs). With linux, I don't have to have anything permanently installed which I am not using. I can strip down a running system to what ever I want or I can add to a running machine on the fly and restart the services without rebooting.

After learning linux admin. I found I can do many of the same things in NT, Win2K and XP as well. Not only will you learn what to do, you will be able to understand exactly why you do it--and in what order. This is a pretty good reason to learn Linux.

The other is I am cheap--though honest. I can't use bogus software, but in windows I can't afford to do everything legit. I don't have to use software I can't afford anymore with Linux. I did pay for Ghost, which I don't use any more and Acronis TrueImage which I do. And quite a few of the other programs I use. And, I am proud to say I use all fully licensed windows products--because I am scared of the BSA.

:-D Thank you very much Eqwatz, you've been a really big help. I think I understand it now, and will be able to partition my hard drive successfully . And thank you itsjustme and bgoins, you helped as well. One last question, however...

In the very beginning, when I set up hda1, hda2, hda3, and hda5, I'm going to use a partitioning utility.. Should I use fdisk on the Linux RH9 cds? fdisk on the Win98SE boot up disk? Or another (free) utility? Thank you.

Since you don't have Partition Magic, use dos fdisk for:

Creating the windows 98se O.S. partition;
The linux /boot partition (But don't format it or anything. You will be recreating it with the redhat installer when you give it a "mount point" and "formatting" it within the Linux installer. Disk Druid? Whatever it's name use the graphical one.);
The extended partition;
And the "private" windows partition.

It would be best (after the Linux install) to do the creation of the "Shared_Data" with Dos fdisk as well--instead of using the linux one.
(Even though I mentioned doing so. My main reasoning is /swap and windows "swap-file" placement for performance.)

Always try to use the native tools for the formatting and creation of partitions for any O.S.. Subtle differences can get ugly very fast. The windows extended partition should always be created by windows just to be sure. The last thing you need is to hose that partition table.

You don't have to use up your whole drive, you can leave space to create hidden partitions for backups or duplicates for testing settings or other distributions.

Don't get too worried about the first couple of installs, especially while you are still learning--when you are more familiar with everything, you will want everything your way. Plus, most likely you will be trying other distributions as well. Why? I don't really know--I think it is some sort of Linux social disease. I really haven't personally met anyone who simply stayed with one default install of any distribution. Not yet, anyway.

Get familiar with dd and other means of copying and backing up files. (With dd you can make a binary image of your windows partition and compress it, just like ghost or TrueImage. (I really like TrueImage.)

Thank you very much. I plan on repartitioning/reinstalling everything a week from today, when I'll have lots of time to do it. One very last question... I think I'd like to have an extra 5 gb partition to install other Linux distros on and have fun with. Since I wouldn't be using them very often, could I just install the distros onto that partition and boot to it from a floppy disk, without worrying about changing my bootloader? And could I mount the swap partition as the same partition that I'll have set for RH9? Thank you very much eqwatz, you've been a great help.

Linux Swap is pretty much linux swap. Just add it to the fstab or mount it from the command-line.

Kernel image + initrd = bigger than a floppy. Unless you can come up with an installation program which uses a custom-stripped kernel specific to your hardware, and doesn't have scripts which assume initrd is going to be used, you are looking at more pain than doing a few edits in /boot/grub/grub.conf.

The first or primary installation of linux(Rh9) should have a separate /boot partition, the following installs of linux should have boot reside in it's repective /. Use grub for all of them--I think. Then add entries for the other distros in /boot/grub/grub.conf with a full path to the kernel which you want to boot--using appropriate syntax for the actual hard drive partition in which the specific /boot and kernel image reside. Before rebooting temperarily mount the other versions of /boot/grub/grub.conf and edit them to also reflect the different distros. OK, yes you are going to be renaming stuff so each vmlinuz has a distinctive name. Read the stuff I linnked to on the bottom of the page.

As I said before, with windows--unless you use the "reach-around" is limited to 26 (a-z) "drives" total ("drives" includes partitions). BUT, windows ignores non-windows partitions.

**Rem. 3 primary + 1 extended + a bunch of logical partitions. Windows will demand to be the first primary (NT4, 2000, or XP)--OR--the only primary (DOS, 95, 98)--OR-- you can try more than one primary, but it might get mad at you (98se, ME, NT). I've done it without problems, but don't know whether circumstances can cause problems.
The first logical drive partition should be windows to prevent problems--it doesn't have to be big.

Linux supports up to six ide interfaces with two drives per interface. That means up to 12 ide based drives. This is from ide.txt-- http://enpc3240.eas.asu.edu/lxr/linu...tation/ide.txt
But this online document is from 2.4 based source, when I searched it, I found mentions of patching the IDE.txt, and didn't read those.

**Note that means drives--not partitions. Partitions are a separate issue.
I'm looking for the other stuff now. I'm probably supposing wrong, but that to me means /dev/hda--/dev/hdl ("L") Remember, other devices aren't included if they aren't ide hard drives or ide cdroms (DVD). Not really positive on other ide-based devices like Zip-drives or ide-tape. All I know is 6 interfaces. If you have one on-board ide then that means you can add 2 more dual channel ide adapter cards on to the PCI bus. But hey, that still leaves SCSI if you get hard-up.

Since I am a low dough kind of guy, I really don't care about the serial stuff--but I think it is seen as IDE. I could be wrong.
http://enpc3240.eas.asu.edu/lxr/linu...es.txt?v=2.4.9

199 For partitions, add to the whole disk device number:
200 0 = /dev/hd? Whole disk
201 1 = /dev/hd?1 First partition
202 2 = /dev/hd?2 Second partition
203 ...
204 63 = /dev/hd?63 63rd partition
205
206 For Linux/i386, partitions 1-4 are the primary
207 partitions, and 5 and above are logical partitions.
208 Other versions of Linux use partitioning schemes
209 appropriate to their respective architectures.

/*Well, I guess that means you can have /dev/hda1-63 with 5-63 being logical partitions (or volumes). That gives you 58 possible logicals + 3 primaries or 59 partitions available if you are dual booting windows NT4, 2K, or XP, because the first primary and first logical go to windows.

*note again this is documentation for 2.4.x kernels, 2.5 kernels may have extensions or differences available.

You definitely must plan your partitions on paper and keep it somewhere you can find it. Don't lose that map of your drive. Be specific as to starting and ending cylinders and actual sizes of the partitions. You will not remember where everything is. The more O.S. -es you put on a system, the more opportunities to hose everything. And go ahead and spend a little time reviewing the partitioning information--I did a search for you.

I strongly suggest you get Acronis TrueImage--not cheap, but much faster than ghost and much less likely to hose stuff up. It also has the option to resize and re-label a partition upon restoration--this is very handy at 2 AM when I am trying to scavenge space to do repairs or recovery of files which weren't backed up from any hosed file system. (Sure, I can do these things in other ways, but I don't have to think with TrueImage--I can just do it. If your time and sanity is worth anything, spend the money. BTW, it will also allow the recover of single files from an image, just like tar and cpio--but has the advantage of working with optical media, tape, network, and hard drive, natively.)

/*I really don't know exactly what caused a problem I had a while back, because to many possibilities were involved and I didn't want to spend the time to really track it down. The solution is to never use an imaging program to back up linux partitions from within windows--especially NT4, 2K, or XP. I had very bad things happen, specifically, windows becoming aware of the partition somehow and attempting to "fix it". To be absolutely safe, create the bootable media and create the images using that on another partition which is shared between windows and linux. Also, linux can be used without an Imaging program to create compressed binary images of partitions. (In reality, that is exactly what TrueImage does, using Cygwin from with-in windows, and a stripped-down knoppix with all of the file utilities from it's own bootable media.)*/

And read up on KickStart for RedHat and the equivalent for the others.

PARTITIONING:

Really intensive article on partitioning, but with examples and why's:
http://www.linuxsa.org.au/tips/disk-partitioning.html Possibly the best.

/*I like keeping /usr as a separate partition because it has become so large on my system--I have developer stuff on there as well and it is rather large. It will eventually get larger. I also like his set-up for the web-server and other stuff--it is definitely a no-no to put stuff like that in /var. Although I keep it all on it"s own partition and mount it to a directory--which is correct, I didn't think of giving it a /home. Spiffy and posix as hell. (It's probably in one of the admin books I have in "like-new" condition.)*/

Don't forget http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Partition/index.html

On the second IBM page (articles n-z) you have to scroll down a ways to the "p" section, you will find some articles on partitioning.

Ah, but there's more to it than that. I suggested using the "LABEL=" parameter in fstab instead of the /dev/hdxX entries. Why? because it gives you the freedom to move partitions around without breaking everything (with the exception of the /boot and / partitions).

Oo-oo, you can only have one /boot or / at a time, right? Well, not necessarily. And, in case you haven't noticed, the new kernels use initrd as well as the kernel image to boot, and the combination don't fit on one floppy anymore.

ARTICLES ON DUAL-BOOTING BETWEEN DIFFERENT LINUX DISTROS:
/*Again, I did a search for you--I really didn't find as much as I expected. You may want to do additional searches to give you more people's experiences in their own words--I find if I look and read enough, someone will put things in a way that makes everything very clear to me. Unless I am willing to recover from a melt-down I invest the time before I do something. In the end, it saves time--really.*/

This is one way to do it--but don't use the label thing just yet. This is a method using lilo. These are IBM guys. Their site has gotten huge! Cool!

http://www-106.ibm.com/developerwork...y/l-dboot.html

This is the main page--look around, neat stuff in here. Okay, it's a little dated, but so am I.
http://www-106.ibm.com/developerwork...x/articles.jsp

Here is a reply rebuttal from LWN about multiple incidences of linux--it left me confused--still looking for the easier, softer way.
/*Didn't know about the history of chroot and its original uses though--it"s worth looking and maybe learning enough to really understand and use it. I really wish I had good CS instructors for my first undergrad degree, I might have gone that way back then--instead they left me confused and semi-suicidal. (Sort of like the snob who wrote about chroot. He reminded me.)*/
http://lwn.net/Articles/2761/

Another from a lug:
http://www.linux.ie/pipermail/ilug/2...ne/004137.html
read previous and following entries in the thread

From linux questions RedHat + SuSE
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...2001/11/2/8350

redhat and debian
http://www.linuxsa.org.au/mailing-li...3-08/1011.html

***I know, I do go on--don't I? Well, when I was first attempting to use/learn linux--people gave me short and glib answers. Many of the answers told me to read the docs. One of my problems was that I didn't even know how to search effectively-- books or websearches--and I was completely buried in information; most of which started with the assumption that I already knew much more than I did. It was heart breaking.
The more I jumped around trying to fill in the gaps in what I knew, the more confused, frustrated and buried I became. That's why I always stress starting from the beginning, taking it easy, pacing yourself to avoid burn-out, and trying to approach this thing in a structured way. I don't want to see anyone putting themselves through the absolute personal hell that I created for myself.
You see, before I learned Linux, I THOUGHT I knew about hardware, networking, administration, and computers in general. In reality, I could pass tests and do things--but I was doing things by rote, without really understanding what I was doing or why I was doing things exactly the way that I did them.
I'm not ignorant, I can "bitch-slap" the average admin.. But, I am far removed from what I consider to be a truly competant Linux administrator--even though I took the courses and passed the tests. In the end, there is too much to know--it is mostly knowing where to look and how to perform effective searching. (Ironically, if I "think" about what I am doing to repair broken software or installations, I am dead-meat. I have to try to "not think" when I am doing stuff; I follow a set of procedures to determine what is wrong. If they are not followed exactly, I complicate things and end up wasting someone else's very expensive time. In my case, it is best not to think. I have in fact, done major repairs to installations without being able to say exactly what I did. That has led to problems with a few people who believe I am ignorant, but can't do what I do. It drives them right up the wall.)
I can honestly say I am very familiar with the file systems, applications, and the source-code for linux. I can say much the same for 98se, NT, W2K, and XP. What I can't say, is that I KNOW them. ****