new install
 

Hello,

I am thinking of giving Suse 10 rc a try. Can I install suse on a second hard disk? The website says the installation program will resize my windows partiton to make room for Suse. I don't want it to, can I tell it to leave my xp hard drive alone and use my other one which already has a 2 gb swap partition and a 78 gb ext3 with slackware on it?

Most distros give you the option of which drive to use but since Suse is deigned to be installed without much knowledge I thought I better ask before i start the install process.
Do I really need the 5 discs? could I get away with 2 or 3.

I used the DVD version so I'm not sure about how many discs are needed. Check each disk and see which only has packages on them, they are usually the ones that don't need to be installed.

In regards to the second hard drive, even though SUSE's installation is easy, it's also pretty informative. You'll be able to select any hard drive you want. I'm pretty sure it could resize your Slackware install but I've never tried that.

BEWARE
 

Do NOT attempt to resize EITHER of these (Windows OR Slackware) partitions without backing all of your important data up first. With Windows, you can run defrag on your harddrive and hopefully clear enough data off of the end of your drive so that you can AFFORD to resize a couple gigs or whatever without losing any really essential system info.

I don't know of a way to defrag your Slackware partition, (or any LINUX for that matter), so if you have been using that long enough so that there is stuff towards the end of the drive you might be out of luck with that. It's a pretty rough gamble with either one of these if you ask me. Recently I had Mandrake resize an NTFS partition that I had just installed XP onto successfully, so it IS possible, but the longer you have been using said partition, the bigger the risk.

As far as what you said about the 'multiple discs'.... did someone maybe say something to you about this? A LINUX friend of mine a while back had Suse for install off of 4 CDs, or 1 DVD. As time goes by, distributions seem to grow. Is that maybe what you were referring to? Ideally, you should only NEED the FIRST CD and ONE hard drive to get an install that will at LEAST allow you to get on the net and get the rest... of whatever it is that you need. (Which, incidentally may be a better way to go as your install will be more up to date)