installing linux, best way to partition?
 

When I get home in a couple hrs I plan on installing red hat 9. I have a 80gig drive that is formatted in NTFS running win2kpro. Now here is where I need the advice of ppl with experience. Should I install red hat 9 and use disk druid to make my partitions or will this not work with NTFS. If it doesn't work like that what do you guys recommend? Any feedback is appreciated. I'm reading this forum a lot on a daily basis so I'm trying to educate myself but some things are a lil fuzzy to me like this situation where I don't fully understand it. Thanks for the help.


Mark

I don't know if disk druid will work with NTFS, but I do know that most folks use ext2 or ext3 formatting for Linux filesystems (if you knew this already and are just trying something new, then by all means disregard that last comment).

I'm also not sure if you are planning to dual-boot this sucker or just allow the entire 80gig drive to be for Linux (always more fun, and less complicated). If you are going dual-boot there's a ton of how-to's out there, if not, then its simply a matter of following all the little prompts you get during the install. I just started using disk druid myself and I now like it better than fdisk.

Consider putting /tmp, /usr/ and /var in their own filesystems. You don't want to hurt /usr because you got important libraries there, and since /var and /tmp get written to a lot you don't want that sharing a partition with your kernel. Some folks put /boot or /root in its own partition, I choose to isolate the heavily written areas instead. Also /home is a good option if you have a lot of users.

You should know that resizing partitions is not a very good idea IMHO.

The programs that do it traditionally cheat like hell to get it to work. So I would recommed reinstalling the lot ;)

But others might have had success with reaizing. I wouldn't do it though...

Good luck ;)

Oh BTW, I just have /boot and /root on their own patitions. boot should have it's own partition because you dont want to mount it on a regular basis. I shouldn't think that having various partitions on their own partitions is going to make much of a difference if they are all housed on the same disk anyway. And if your new to linux / UNIX then understanding the filesystem structure is hard enough without trying to figure out which directory tree will need however much diskspace.

By Default Red Hat Linux, you cannot use the NTFS Partitions from your linux. One way of accessing your NTFS partitions from your linux os is just recompile the kernel with the NTFS support enabled. Hope this will work for you.

Good Luck.

I've decided that after all the trouble I've been having with red hat 9 installing that I'm going to go with another distro. I'm going to try out mandrake 9.1, I've heard a lot of good feedback on it. I'm going to try the mandrake as a dual boot for now and see if I want to make it my only OS.


Mark

Mark,

I havent had the chance to try Mandrake, but I think that your biggest headache initially is going to be partitioning the hard disk properly. So do you have the software that will allow you to repartition while trying to save your currently saved info or will you start from scratch for both distributions (win and linux)?

Once you have free space for a linux install you dont need to worry about using ntfs. You can install the proper package in Red Hat that will allow you to read the information on the ntfs partitions. You WONT be able to write to them though as I understand it. I dont think that Mandrake has that ability either.

Anyway, good luck.