Background:
I had a dual boot system before but that was back in 2003. It was windows 2000 / Mandrake 9. I have been away from computers for 2 years so my memory has faded on how to set up a dual boot system a little. Also mandrake did everything so I did not learn how to set it up.

Alright my question/concern:
My partitions are setup like this...
/dev/hda (30GB) -Windows XP SP2 install
/dev/hda2 (0GB) -Extended
/dev/hda5 (40GB) -NTFS for Audio Files
/dev/hda6 (40GB) -NTFS for Data Files

Unallocated is 8GB right now but I can move some things around and make more space. I plan on getting a 500GB HDD that will copy the whole file structure of this drive over to so soon the unallocated space will be some where in the range of 370GB. More than enough for Linux. >

I was planing on creating two ext2 partitions a 1GB swap and 20GB for Slackware. From what I read that is all I would need to do but I also want to use GRUB to be the boot loader. I have been looking around trying to find doc's on how to go about doing this with Slackware but everything keeps saying Red Hat or SuSE.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks,
Kyle

When you buy your new hhd, you can add this hdd as separate dir in Slackware like /data or /media, where all your files (movies, music, etc) will be located. For Linux system 8Gb will be more than enough.

Now you have 8Gb raw space. You need to boot slackware and use cfdisk, when it asks. Then allocate 1-2 Gb for swap, and other space for the root filesystem of your choice. As well, you can use fdisk, but cfdisk is more intuitive.

You can find grub in /extra, install and use grubconfig.

Ok so I created two logical partitions /dev/hda7 (2GB) and /dev/hda8 (5GB). Now I am doing the partitioning with PMagic7 so I just set it up where its two unallocated partitions. Just to save some extra steps when installing slackware. Should I have it format the 2GB as linux swap and the 5GB as ext2 or would you recommend having linux do the formatting?

Thanks for the Help,
Kyle

I would recommend formatting in linux, because last time i used pmagic it didn't correctly format my ext2. Slackware didn't recognize it as ext2 so i had to format again (this time using Linux). But you can try, it won't be worse, but it can be better.

Hi,

I agree that you should either format the partitions on your own or use the Slackware install cd instead of PMagic7. I prefer to create from the cli.

From cli after boot cd1;

Note: Don't turn the swap on, let the installer do it.

I would then reboot the cd1 to update all the disk partition information. I also suggest the use of the ext3 journaled filesystem instead of the ext2.

BTW, 2GB of swap is a lot of swap space. I always like to create my partitions to confirm that the partition space is valid, especially the swap.

Thanks for the reference link to 'Slackware LQ Suggestions Links' in your sig.

Well I did part of the partitioning in linux, I have yet to format it them. I am going with 1GB swap because I already have 1GB of DDR Ram. and the rest around 7.5GB as the / linux dir.

The only thing that ext3 adds is the journaling ability correct? So I wont have to wait for it to scan everything when/if ever slackware crashes?

No problem the links are helping me out so I want to make it so they can help others too.

Thanks,
Kyle

if I may interject-
you might even prefer fat32 for these paritions so linux will have write capability to these. or at least create some 'shared'=vfat partiton to facilitate moving data between linux and winblows.

I think you _really_ want a journaled filesystem. The metadata it creates protects you from file/disk corruption in the unlikely event of your box getting shutdown incorrectly (power loss, power button<when improperly configured, etc) and the checks really don't take too long. IMHO

also on the swap, I've heard that its nice to have swap as big as RAM (or more) if you plan to use hibernate. but I'm not 100% on that... (I am setting up software suspend right now)

I've no problem with NTFS partition. I use ntfs-3g, it has read and write capability on ntfs, and everything OK .
By the way fat32 has some limitations, it couldn't handle partition more than 40 Gb (or 30 Gb, i'm not sure), and you couldn't save a file that've more than 4Gb of size (ex: DVD ISO).

oh... i forgot to mention that i use ntfs-3g on ubuntu.

Well I started the install of slackware and the swap partition was formated just fine. Now I went on to format the 7.2GB as / and I selected to have it check for bad sectors. Now its been on the same screen for over 2 hours now. How long should it take to format a 7.2GB partition for ext3 while checking?

My understanding of what slackware is doing with the formating is as if I just ran the command. mke2fs -c -j /dev/hda8 but I am sure its locked up with the install. Any thoughts on why formating it would take so long?

Thanks,
Kyle

Take some time to choose your filesystem. Read up a little on them. They all have pros and cons. I have used reiserfs for many years and have had no problems, even when my system dies (I have a laptop. Software suspend works great now, but before it didn't, so my system would "die" regularly.) And it doesn't ever do that annoying full check that extx used to do occasionally.

Brian