Hi there. I have been tinkering off and on over the years with varous flavors of linux. I guess I am an advanced beginner; am comfortable with the command line and probably know about 50 or so commands. I have played some with an ubuntu server in the cloud.

I was happy to discover this site! I always found it extremely frustrating that such a great operating system as well as the whole open source concept was being guarded by grumpy geeks screaming 'RTFM!', instead of people wishing to spread the word and embracing nenwcomers.

I have an eeepc 1000HE netbook which is about five years old (1 gig RAM). I am trying to set up a dual boot with XP, the OS that it shipped with. I have sucsessfully created a live Arch linux USB, and now am struggling with the install onto my hard drive.

I am a bit confused about the whole partition /filesystem thing. My drive came partitioned, such that when I look at it from XP "my computer" there is a second "drive" available for use. It is empty and I want to install Archlinux there. Do I have to format this partition or do I just mount this partition, choose a filesystem and install a boot loader?

From within XP if I rignt click on the "D" drive icon and choose format, it gives me the option of choosing NTFS or exFAT file system. It also lets me choose an "allocation unit size". This is currently set at 4096 bytes but it lets me choose 512, 1024, 2048 bytes as well.

Meanwhile when I boot from the archlinux live USB, fdisk -l reveals four partitions.

/dev/sda1 is the bootable win XP partition which corresponds (I think based on the size and the fact that it is the bootable partition) with the C: drive in windows. its size is about 82 gigs (just like C: ) the ID is 7 and the "system" is HPFS/NTFS/exFAT

/dev/sda2 appears to be the "drive D:" which is empty and where I want to put my linux OS. It's size is about 60 gigs which also corresponds to the size of the drive D and has the same "system" and "system ID" as /dev/sda1.

FWIW /dev/sda3 is about 5 gigs has system ID 1c and system is called Hidden W95 FAT32 (LBa)
/dev/sda4 is tiny has system ID ef and system EFI (FAT-12/16/32).

So now I am not sure how to continue. If I don't care about further partitioning and just want one root partition, do I need to do any formatting? If so, should I do this within XP or just by mounting /dev/sda2 and then using the mkfs command?

Do I even need to change the filesystem or is HPFS/NTFS/exFAT a fine choice of filesystems for my netbook. Even if I don't need to do I want to change the filesystem. If I want to our need to, what filesystem should I choose?

OR can I just configure grub of syslinux and everything will just magically work? I truly have been pouring through the relevant manuals but I am kind of scared that I will screw something up and then be unable to even boot XP, so getting a confirmation from a real person at this point would be super helpful! I don't particularly care if the files I created and stored in Windows dissapear, but I don't want to be stuck, unable to boot the OS obviously.

Sorry for the longwindedness and thanks in advance!

potmo

Before you start BACK UP YOUR SYSTEM!

Looks like sda2 ( your D drive can be used for a new system, but it needs to be one of the 'linux' friendly filesystems ext2/3/4 as linux depends heavily on symlinks and fat etc does not support them.

If you want to build lfs you will need to split this partition into three one for a host system, I would sugest slackware as you say you have some linux experience, one for swap space and also a partition for your LFS, when LFS is up and running and you have built the basic system and installed wget from BLFS ( which in my opinion SHOULD be in the basic system ) you can delete the host system and release the disk space.

Formatting and partitioning can usually be done from the install disk of whatever host system you choose to use, as 2 partitions are reserved for window 'C' and the 'hidden' drive, you will be limited to two other 'primary' partitions but as you will probably need swap space you will need to make the 'D' drive an 'extended' partition and add the thee partitions that you will need to that, I know this sounds confusing but it really isn't!

Don't hesitate to ask further questions.

1 members found this post helpful.

Keith,

Thanks so much for your thorough and quick respons to my questions! I am truly embarassed right now, because I didn't realize that Linux From Scratch was actually a distribution of sorts and wasn't just "building from scratch" in the sense of not being like Ubuntu, where a whole bunch of packages get automatically installed for you and all you have to do is type apt-get install and you are set.

Your answer made that clear to me and LFS looks like a very interesting project, but I fear it might be a bit too advanced for me right now. I am going to use the Arch distribution for now as it is the "from scratch"" that I was looking for! I don't want to continue to clutter up this forum with non-topical questions but I did want you to know that I read and appreciated your response and some of my questions were answered, and most of my initial confusion regarding your answer has to do with my total nubiousity! I shouldnt have just clicked the drop down box and chosen "Linux from Scratch"!

As Gilda Radner's character would say, "Never mind".

pomto